In the west side desert, Cheney Pump Station
sits on the broken oil line northwest of Three Rocks.
Three Rocks is a long mile north
of the old oil line pumps at Halfway House.
South and east of the wreckage at Halfway House,
Mount Whitney’s west summit line connects through Five Points.
North and east of the Five Points
is the Four Corners and the J-13 dies there.
Quickly away from the corners using the 180 grade,
the Sierra rises and crests the Kings River’s canyon.
Further see the Sequoia trees.

I had a childhood fear of the Cheney engine.
I used to farm half ways between
Three Rocks and Five Points.
I used to steal trucks in to Four Corners
and escape down the J-13.
I used to white water river scramble
during flood years in the upper King’s Canyon.

And I learned to high jump in the Sierra,
but not as high as those trees . . .

Mostly women drove the U-Hauls.
They’d pass in the dark with a traveler’s glance,
and the Buffalo rode easy through the cold.
Tired, I parked the motorcycle in New Mexican scrub
and slept till the afternoon sun woke me outside of Santa Rosa.

My mother was slowly dying back in Fresno,
but I bought coffee, gas,
and the Richard Reeves book on Jack Kennedy.

The rest of my day
went by the large round bales of hay farms,
with junkyards on the corners.

That night, I slept late by an abandoned cotton gin —
spent the following afternoon
reading about Kennedy —
slept there again.

The next day’s no conversation at the gas pumps
as the big trucks blew past.
And there’s a sulfur smell in the Texas air along I-10.

The Davis Mountains swallowed a pastel sunset in the distance.
I stopped and ate oatmeal bars
while the Texas light changed to a complete moon.
Back on the bike, through an endless land of lifted limestone,
an up and down geography of exposure from wind and rains.

Fort Stockton after midnight.

A couple of hours later outside of Ozona,
needing cigarettes, I pulled into a rest stop to roll Drums.
Smoked two, reorganizing my thing —
a ragged leather jacket wrapped around a flat brim hat,
and the Richard Reeves book on Kennedy
with most of a hundred dollars inside.

Noah’s old Water Buffalo had dangerous tags;
its tank was three-quarters full of gasoline.

I’d thought to begin writing in Memphis — or New Orleans.
But a Fresno poet named Luthor Rollins
believed their summer rains were too constant.
So I was probably riding towards Austin.

The next four hundred miles
detoured away from the 10, and it took
more than a day to arrive at downtown Dallas
at three in the morning, a quiet time
rolling toward the dead end — parking in back
of that knoll where the Reeves profile on power stopped.

Downslope, Dealey Plaza
seemed diminished at night with a softer kind
of yellow glow than the harsh Zapruder Film had.
The road looked steeper, and there was no one — quiet in the city.

I wandered alone on the Elm side
of a divided triangle common in street glow.
Zapruder framed Kennedy’s death in the sunshine
as the world changed when it was over from his right side …
a cab passed down the Elm Street about that slow.

I rode south from Dallas and stopped in Waco for fuel;
then the sun rose before my arrival
in the outskirts of Austin with sixty dollars.

Austin used simple street math, so I parked on the 24th,
resting a few hours in the shade under live oaks.
Refreshed, I caught a bus through tree-lined residential streets.

My seat was at the front, and there were many kinds
on and off at the stops before an old woman climbed on.

Wearing a pretty dress, in her late seventies;
she had fine white hair, a Northern European face:
a stroke victim inside her declining years.
The old woman nodded, taking my seat.

Over the next few stops I imagined her as maybe an Anne —
possibly a widow in the dawn
surrounded by early bed light and their old things —
maybe on her way to the midday symphony …
because she’d played the oboe, but her oboe had been put away.

Then the driver dropped me south of the Capitol,
next to the river with my first Austin story framed behind me.
Looking north from a smaller Colorado,
the Congress was a long avenue lifting to a dome.
If the river was zero, the Capitol might be the 12th or 15th Street.

A few blocks away, Rueben, a street man,
knew where to get coffee.
He said over on the 7th Street
in the old warehouse area
where truck docks were turned into bars and clubs.

The Asphalt Café used six of my sixty dollars
for an average sandwich and some coffee —
I was caffeine-driven until three
in the morning reading Reeves again.

After the café closed,
I walked west on the 6th Street
past used cars and a wall
with a glass mosaic of an Austin street man.

Moving closer, I discovered the mosaic was made
from bottle ends and the artist signed himself as Night Train.

Looking for shelter off the 6th Street,
I went further north past houses converted to law firms,
and found shelter in a Lutheran schoolyard near the 15th Street.
In the daylight there was a tunnel next to the jungle gym.

I walked back to the 24th and drank more coffee,
then rode the Buffalo downtown,
weaving in and out
of jarring traffic on Congress
till rush hour slowed us all to a crawl.

Traffic crept forward in solid lines through the morning swamp.
Red-suited Texas women strode down sidewalks
like they’d come from cluttered bathrooms.
After parking, I went against them
while they looked through my farm clothes.

Politics was the same new conservative
except for downtown’s better core of old.

Austin trash swirled after lunch;
off in the distance, scattered clouds
made it a humid rainfall country.

Back on the bike,
riding to the east side of I-35,
midafternoon rain poured from the trees.
I parked on a greasy side street in front of a bar —
a kind of damp, smoky place that played Ray Charles.
I drank sparingly, nursing the cash.

It poured outside the Austin bar for several hours,
and I returned to the Lutheran schoolyard after dark —
it seemed wise to be gone from the tunnel by sunrise.

A few hours later, the click sound
of halogens woke me to another storm.
It was raining out there, and a police car turned at the corner.

I saw a flattened leather ball by the jungle gym
that must have bounced strange and rolled wrong for quite a few.

Opening the Reeves book to a blank page,
my watch looked like two o’clock when I spoke out loud.

Phrases come as odd lots.

I started jotting them down in the Lutheran yard.
Tried writing out of gas in the garlic sacking crews,
where postwar Indochinese men
sacked on even days,
women sacked on the odds.
Watched them work their asses off
to pay for growing snow peas.

They were additionally financed
by refugee resettlement acts.
I went ahead and wrote that stuff down —
before deciding to get to a shelter in the morning,
to get what’s needed, and then get the hell away …

At sunrise along the Congress,
a street woman didn’t care where the Shelter was
and wanted to be left alone.
Then the morning sun rose into clouds,
and better-dressed people ignored me.
Some “night trains” were leaning against a bank.

It felt more natural asking them —
they said the Salvation Army
was over on the 8th Street,
against the traffic court and I-35.
But the Shelter wouldn’t accept for another hour,
and the “night trains” needed a smoke.

I never got their names
as we smoked my next-to-last one.
One man needed a dollar.
My state of mind was almost out of cigarettes,
and I couldn’t help him —
walking away as morning crowds gathered in the city.
I smoked the last on a bench
as several buses passed every half hour
and a crane added layers to a building.

During the rush hour
a bus discharged a black man dressed in gray.
He hesitated for a second … seeming pleased,
steppin’ down to the pavement —
throwing old air out and taking new air in.
The same carbon black face as baseball’s “Cool Papa” Bell,
his clothes were state issue.
He sat down beside me, silent a little while …
clearing his throat before calling me sir, which amused me.

Released from prison yesterday,
he wanted to know where some shelter was.
When I told him about sleeping in a Lutheran play yard,
he said his name was Max Gonzales from a Huntsville prison.
He sat looking around like a man who’d been away,
and spoke in complete sentences, noting our cars had changed.
Then our conversation evolved
into Luthor teaching poetry at a California prison,
and Max said there weren’t any poems in his cell.

When I asked him what he wanted to do,
Max said he wanted to be a cabinetmaker
and asked about me:

“I might try writing.”

“Why?”

“It’s cheaper than farming.”

Max laughed and asked again
if I knew where the Shelter was.

Another storm was coming, so we started walking,
clouds covered us with a quick rain — toward the Capitol,
we turned right for the Shelter.
Six more blocks uphill in the wet,
till Max asked a man
who pointed at an impersonal structure
rising like a four-story warehouse.
Max said it looked assembled on sight —
with the same tilt-up construction technique
that prisons used.

I wondered if the beds were clean,
but Max told me to keep my mouth shut in there.

The concrete enclosure seemed about five years old,
yet the steps were middle-aged.
Up the stairs with wet clothes, they let us in.
The Shelter was pitted walls and frustration smells
with buzzer doors having crisscrossed wires in the glass.

We were called clients —
there were forty of us in the foyer, maybe more.
A blend of screaming and shoving
with a little Spanish chingaso and some fuck you.
We used our ears in a simple exercise figuring out the rage,
and Max guessed the winners sat in chairs
and the losers stood arguing with the winners of those chairs.
Arguments and pissed-off tension veering to indecision.
More bullshit when everyone heard the fiction and nonfiction
of an ex-soldier passing a radio around,
saying tubes made a warm sound …
Max handed the receiver back with a smile.

Then up through the old clothes and iron hair,
harassed shelter monitors passed out numbers
from behind a steel credenza.
One bellowed at us to stay
within the painted lines of a reinforced floor …
We did, standing in twisted shadows from damaged overheads,
while the man ahead of us had lost his bicycle in Round Rock
and the man behind us came in to bathe.
When we got our numbers,
we were number twenty-four and -five
through the wire door.

The other side opened to a cavern
where street noise evolved from
disagree to violence in the back alley.

Down the stairs, a quick sideways glance
at a wall hung with clammy clothes.
Did we need to see elderly men in the open showers?

We did — and still wore damp clothes at eleven a.m.,
with Pine-Sol odor at the written check-in.

Two hours of standing around another credenza
before the process woman wrote us into
Lane’s Job Searching Class.
She ran the elevator too and then unlocked
the steel door at the third room.
The process woman told us,
so we’d know where we were —
no humor in the eye contact.

Inside, we smeared our language on forms —
while Lane said he’d served on submarines
and introduced us out loud to the class,
who didn’t care who we were.
Lane had a depressing pallor and weight,
in a windowless room — no view and pass/fail like high school.
And everyone wore the same kind of tennis shoes.

When Lane asked, I mumbled the cover lie of a broken motorcycle;
then his eyes teared up, saying, “That’s just too damned bad.”

He told Max at the break how the Shelter saved police man-hours.

Lunch, was food in the noise,
and a classmate wanting my Reeves —
she called herself Hope, telling me her name twice,
and kept the book under her sweatshirt.

Hope left the Alleghenies after tenth grade,
before being raped in New Jersey
and driving Freightliners out of Shreveport
to pay for tattoos in New Orleans.

Later on, she became a thin woman
topless dancing near Juarez
and buried her dog on the rock hill of Oatmeal, Texas.

A confusion of voices over a pale yellow stew,
and my filling broke on hard bread.
No knives used, as most heads stayed down
in a sea of disagreement over the spoons.
Discarded empty plates in the trash cans
with mentions of God.

Down the hall, Salvation Army commanders
dressed like admirals, and I’d almost forgotten where I was.

That afternoon Lane had us practicing interviews for jobs.

The Shelter’s most useful rule
was “shower before bed or be evicted as unwashed” —
so we were a naked mass in a group shower.

I slept with forty-two clean men that night.
The adjacent bunk had a congested Stanford lawyer
who’d served time for grass,
and above me a mechanic saving his money for tools.

In the half-light, ex-clients called “monitors”
paced between the bunks, watching us out of gas on our mattresses.
A fight woke me to two thieves stealing the same pair of shoes.
Shouting monitors solved the shoe chaos.
Then — just as Max said — it was “quiet down” in the voluntary jail.

At five-thirty we ate breakfast donations
while someone threw chairs at the overheads.
Later on became morning job exercises,
and that afternoon everyone passed the class.

On the third day, Lane set me up with Rashmon
over at the Labor Hall on the 2nd Street for some cash work.
Rashmon wore dirty white shirts, shaved badly, and got screamed at.
He used a morning number toss for your place in the work line.

I lost Rashmon’s toss and went outside to the parking lot.
Overcast above the homeless men on the asphalt,
as they surged around a contractor bellowing “fence holes.”
Failing to break through the crowd, I heard
someone else’s “garbage cans.”
Dove in to say I’d do it, and got in a truck
to paint garbage cans green.

On my fifth day in the Shelter,
I walked into the Labor Hall and lost the toss again.
Outside, there was too much anxiety
in the crowded parking lot,
so I bought my way through the noise
to the river with three cigarettes.
I found peace near the running paths
next to traffic on the 1st Street.

After a few hours beside the sand-colored water,
couples mostly ran back and forth
beside the Colorado between two weirs —
small dams that slowed the surface to a fluid mirror.
Maybe they were Lyndon Johnson’s weirs.
The upstream had an old power plant
with concrete verticals and aging stains rising from distant trees;
downstream, I felt kind of outside of things,
while an eight-man shell rowed beneath an Austin bridge.

My restless journey across the Southwest
continued to a smaller Asphalt Café,
northwest of the Capitol by the 24th.
I drank coffee inside, before leaving
to get fresh clothes from the motorcycle.

Most nights, after curfew in the Shelter,
it was cigarettes in the common,
like the old jail yards Max said.
A yellow line divided us from women,
while a monitor mopped a mess in the corner.

So we were smoking near the harsh ammonia,
while across the line, a young Kentucky girl offered herself —
a feminine nightmare with skin disease —
and the mop man enjoyed her.

Most of the women were usually beaten crazed
or ruined young, and some were just stupid
like the Kentucky girl.
Most nights, Hope stumbled over the line for a smoke,
blowing plumes of stories from the women’s floor.

Her dry hacking cough mixed in
with screams and scratches over a fur coat.

Smoke mixed in with bleeders from the gums
flushing their guts away — too much for Max,
and he turned aside as she got to the dead one.

Hope just kept going through it,
talking woodenly about them as children,
and I was thoughtless of my own.

Lane called me in on my eighth day in the Shelter:

“Rashmon’s got something for you,
but it’s complicated and strange — a little patience.”

“Fine, what is it?”

“Well, there’s a roofer takes our people in.”

“Who?”

“Leo fixes roofs. Meet his man Brian in the morning.”

My long week in the Shelter
meant much more than a turnstile
for saving police man-hours —
I wished Max well and left at dawn.

Outside there were “night trains” asleep against the walls.

A month later, Hope still lived in the bedlam and avenue grime,
while Lane’s records indicated Max made rural chairs
out in Dripping Springs.

But when I checked there,

no one knew who Max Gonzales was …

I waited with a dozen men in the alley behind a gym
till an oily red flatbed skidded up.

“Good morning Brian, where’s the boss?”

“Not here Roy, check out the truck, please.”

The red Ford had vise grips wired to the hood;
then the hot smell of antifreeze around a grimy motor —
two quarts down, no air filter.
I got in and sat in the filthy passenger seat
with my knees up to my chin because of trash on the floor.
The boss roared up in a single-seat car,
burdened with tools and rolls of tarpaper —
wild eyed, he got out, barking,

“That red Ford got oil? water? Let’s go,
let’s go — stop, stop, stop — tighten those studs,
ladders. Let’s go, Brian, move, tools, move.”

I stepped out for Leo, a tall thin man
stooped around bright suspicious eyes;
a mild speech impediment solved by hollering.

“Hi ya Roy, gotta smoke? You a farmer? good.
I been around, done some, seen some —
haven’t seen it all, seen some.”

Gray ponytailed hair down to his waist,
out of cigarettes, maybe a loud pain in the ass.

“Gotta smoke? Let’s go.”

I liked him.

Brian told me to ride with him; and I made an enemy
clearing roof trash and tools off the floor
when I got into the passenger seat.
Later, James, the huge black man, told me the seat was his.

Brian seemed nervous as we pulled a hot tar kettle
that appeared from the shed, followed by Raymond, Leo’s father,
in an old green Chevy one-ton with crooked white doors.
A cracked side mirror showed it hauling a load
of smiling men down the tree-covered alley.
And as they followed us around the corner,
a white door flew open to hit a pole —
a God dammit came from Raymond’s ravaged door.

Then we were a procession in sunshine
to the gas station for Celia’s coffee — all of it.

“Celia, this man’s Roy Ruth, he works for us.”

“Hello Mr. Ruth, seventy-six cents please.”

“Thank you, Celia.”

It took all of rush hour to get to the job,
where a myriad of commands backed the kettle down the drive.
Leo had his ways, and the kettle was still warm from the day before.
The propane burner was carefully lit by a man named Castro.
He managed the fire, loading solid kegs of cold tar
and got them boiling thin in half an hour.

The day became a small hot tar for most of the crew,
and later a tear-off for Camey, Brian, and myself;
the roof was already taken down a couple of layers.
Men unrolling tarpaper or hauling 90-pound buckets of tar
down the driveway and up splattered ladders to the roof.
Flood the paper surface with mopped boiling tar
as glue for heavy modified paper; strap the perimeter with metal;
nail that. A 140 degrees — hot tar roofing.
Men furiously working, hot, haul the trash off.

Leo left. Camey, Brian, and I left to the next job.
On the way, Brian gave me bread to eat, saying,

“I’ve got creative writing this morning.
Most of our jobs are hot tar,
but Camey and I will teach you to tear-off —
be careful, it’s Leo’s test.”

“What’s a tear-off?”

“Tear the old shingles down to the slats.
This one’s old, Roy, a four layer.”

We tore some off and slid it over the side into the truck.
Leo appeared, gave me cash to eat, took Brian to class,
leaving Camey with me —
a smart guy smiling at my tattered Spanish.

After lunch, John Joe Monroe replaced Brian.
He talked a lot and hated Mexicans.

“My wife’s Leo’s belly dance instructor.
I’m special, and my new tattoo’s infected. Got any grease?
Leo needs me to run the big jobs.
I’ve been in prison, ’n women like me.
I’m a carpenter, builder of anything.
Where’d you get that bike?”

“In the Devil’s Den, John Joe.”

Then Monroe mentioned riding those Indians and Beemers,
chased the niggers through the Poconos and Catskills,
lumberjacked there, fished off Florida; then last month
met his third wife at the Rainbow Gathering in New Mexico.

“She needs stability — I give it to her and our kids.
The father’s comin’ next week — he’s an asshole.”

John Joe Monroe was the dumbest fucker I ever met.

The rest of the crew arrived about three
and ripped off more of the roof, peeling shingles
or standing on the attic rafters
to shatter the shakes above with shovels.

Leo saw me fading in the heat — gave me yellow pills …
a minute later yellow sweat streamed from my forearms.
At five, the truck was full, tarped, and tied;
and the crew enjoyed the ride to the alley,
where it was payday.

“Brian, I don’t want any tools,
anything overnight in these trucks.”

After the men were paid,
Leo had me drive the trash to the dump —
a slow, humid hour out of town through the gate.
Austin’s refuse drew scavenger birds and swarming flies
as yellow crawlers and sheepfeet packed down the limestone dirt.
The wasting mounds were a moon ruin over plastic sheets,
layered and buried underground to trap the poisons.
The sign said to unload trash by hand
till their skiploader could find the chain and pull out the rest —
it did, and I found my way back though heavy traffic to the alley.

Almost dark when Leo hollered from the trees,

“Roy, there’s work tomorrow, need cash now?”

“Nah, I need a place to stay.”
“Are your chakras and path clean?”

“Not anymore.”

“Well, you can pitch a tent in my backyard.”

It wasn’t too far from the gym,
so I parked the Buffalo in his driveway.
Leo’s yard had limestone walls under tough oak trees.
We spread out a roofing tarp in the weeds, set the tent up,
and put a plaid bag inside with a Punjabi pillow for my head.
My rent became a case of Guinness every month,
and I read with a two-stage camp light
and ashed into a Drum can.

I rode to the Asphalt Café the following morning:
an iron counter with motel ashtrays on scarred tables;
there was also the usual monthly art on dirty walls
around a grimy nation of squares for a floor.
After buying an endless refill from the Hindu barista,
I found a dog-eared critique by Garry Wills
on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural,
and spent all day reading that —
which explained the pair of political poems
as what the war became and Lincoln’s explanation why.

My next few months
were chaotic mornings loading trucks, before entering
a badly designed entrance off of the 42nd Street —
merging blind into I-35 with shattered mirrors
on an overloaded truck.

Our first really big job was the Comic Book Store;
most were old warehouses converted to bars and clubs.

But sometimes we had payroll delays;
Leo’s crew were unusually patient as he hesitated —
a month, then five weeks,
while we got a sheepish forty dollars here and there.

Leo finally arrived with $22,000 in a shopping bag,
counted out on Raymond’s filthy hood —
scrawled notes, payroll memories, whatever …
everybody paid.

After work, I sink-bathed most evenings in the café
and read a thousand pages a week.
Brian’s borrowed library card got me into Boorstin,
anthropology, and desert Gods; Korea, Bukowski,
some crime trash, and twentieth-century general history.

By December, I’d made a barista friend
named Eleanor, an oil painter who’d flown her dog
into Austin for nine hundred dollars — Ito on downers.

Ito died in a farewell room at the veterinary hospital.
I never knew her.

Then Eleanor wasn’t around after New Year’s.
Intelligent Moe said she’d been at home
stretching canvas over frames.
Weeks of painting before a progression evolved;
another month till they were hung in the Asphalt Café:
twenty-eight retrievers in four parallel rows,
her paintings ran left to right across
the south wall —
starting as real and changing to surreal
in a smoke-filled room — while I wrote by the best middle dogs.

After several months in the Austin mass,
all I had was motorcycles and tractors in the same patterns.

The next morning got spent writing cowboys, women, Bob Wills,
and oompah-pah at a chicken dance that was a waste of time.

So I wrote about a café dog
named after a starstruck L.A. judge.

Ito was a homely brown dog
with nice eyebrows and black lips.
She usually slept by the front door
and shed several dustpans of hair every week.
Ito also had bad teeth, an unpleasant stench;
and yes, her anal glands were especially expressive,
so you had to listen to her working on that all night.

But after developing a cough last year
from congestive heart failure and lung cancer,
it was time to put her down.

So Ito got bathed and walked around the block —
she cost $30 for shots
and $105 through the oven.
Their invoice said that Ito weighed
46 pounds going in,

60 ounces coming out …

An old woman on the bus took my seat
surrounded by her bed light and her old things
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne
A great looking woman ready to die

Maybe a widow in the dawn
who’d played the oboe, but her oboe’s gone
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne
I hope she gets to the symphony

A mile south of the tracks
by an old schoolhouse full of the past
she put it all away, her oboe’s gone, her oboe’s gone away

An old woman on the bus took my seat
surrounded by her bed light and her old things
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne

Time passed and my situation changed.

Landis was a slight musician with careful hands.
He rented me a couch, played six strings,
and read political history
a block away from the Asphalt Café.
A bad cook, his people were politicians.
After leaving school he’d returned to the guitar;
now he played in the back room
while I wrote by the front door so we wouldn’t trip
over each other in his small, grimy space.

Books and picks were everywhere.
Both of us stayed poor,
sometimes eating back alley food —
as a couple of fools arguing over pizza boxes.
One night we found a case of beer
and had a few for the postwar farm changes,
another for the music in the bathroom.
We were a winter absurdity enjoying the beer —
and our money came from moving rocks on two-wheeled carts,
which was sporadic work and barely paid the rent.

The following week, Landis took me to
a cold-night campout — a hundred guitars playing
around a Hill Country fire till boss Jay took over,
allowing two guitars at a time under the stars.

Back home, the Two-Guitar Rule became my metaphor
for simple things written on shopping bags.
My punctuation was overdone;
I recalled Fresno nuns from far in the past
who would’ve had issues with commas everywhere —
they’d probably suggest more and’s.

Instead, I asked Landis about semicolons.
Wiping down a guitar, he looked up to say,

“Mary had a little lamb; semicolon;
the animal had white hair. Period.”

“Thanks, man, now I’m better.”

Then the roofers hadn’t been seen for a couple of months
till I saw Leo one day over on the 15th Street —
he looked a little sideways.

“Hiyya, Roy, we still need some rains —
first time I had to tell the crew to find
other jobs for a while.”

Hollow-eyed he continued,

“Raymond’s old truck blew a head gasket,
so did he — we got to have rain, man,
my old cats are staring the clouds in,
purring for the big ones;
but it rains somewhere else, not here.”

I thought about this for several days — overcast rainless days.
Leo’s crew were deserving hot tar roofers without a reason for cover;
besides, I owed Leo twenty-four dollars —
maybe a rain prayer could help Leo’s cats witch the rains along.

So I wrote in a time of blooming warmth:

We need warm rain, we want informing rains,
rains for obligations.
Rains to remind people that water ages cover.

Other places have painful floods;
we have lowering streams and diminished flows.

Don’t send a hurting wind rain,
just a reminder so people know where the water goes.

If the rains come, we can return to boiling tar;
our money can take us overseas.
And while we’re gone,
Raymond’s heads will be sealed
and Burning Man won’t seem so far away.
We need drizzle water — rain words that run to lows.

Desiring a gentle Tuesday storm for roofers,
Thursday weather turned to cold and sleet,
while my debt to Leo remained twenty-four dollars —
I guess we all need rains for obligations.

We need warm rain, informing rain,
rains for our obligations …

No more lowering streams and diminished flows,
just reminders where the water goes.

Just reminders where the water goes …
send us rains for our obligations.

We need warm rain, informing rains,
rains for obligations.

No more lowering streams and diminished flows,
just reminders where the water goes.

Just reminders where the water goes …
send us rains for our obligations.

Ahhh ah ahhh.

How’s the goddamned sky?

A couple of weeks later
it was a cold morning walk wearing Birkenstocks
after cold sleet changed to ice, making it slick on the sidewalk.
I limped sore-toed into the Asphalt Café.

Landis was staring at the ice, and he looked sick and pale.
I asked him why.
Landis said it was last night’s wake.

“Wake?”

“Well, Dave Redmond fainted and his girlfriend
found me in the phone book.”

So, they carried unconscious Dave
out of his bathroom, loaded into his car,
and took him down to the Austin hospital —
where the CAT scan read burst aneurysm all the way.
Dave died at three o’clock.

Then Landis played a bar
where the musicians knew Dave Redmond.
After it became Dave’s wake, a customer wandered into the music,
saw and heard the odd strains, and asked why.
Landis told him it was a wake for dead Dave Redmond;
the customer’s eyes tightened as he murmured
“What’s goin’ on?” and that his name was David Redmond —
the CAT scan tech for a dying man with the same name.
Shook him up so bad: he’d gone to that bar to relax.

Outside, Austin was closed down by ice storm.

We left the café, wandering a few blocks to the restored capitol —
they’d reworked the joints and columns in the legislature,
but the halls were lined with pictures of old men.
We went past them, talking about segregation
and the “One Man, One Vote.”
On our way through the legislature,
echoes under the rotunda reminded me
of my grandfather’s house —
then the rough Texas paintings of white men
showed us out of the capitol
with no more mention of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Outside on the cold ice again,
we slid past law firms and my old Lutheran yard;
and turned the corner into reconstruction
of the intersection at Congress and Martin Luther King.
We counted six heaters helping red-faced men
make overtime on the backhoes —
then Landis wondered if the farming was like that.

No, our heat came from burning stakes in barrels —
why those buried water lines cost several farms just to build,
and you’ve got more fingers in the urban pie
with less speed than the rural.

We looked around at the average Southwest
or the white man’s Mexico
and left the operators to their backhoes.

Up the street, he refined our history even more,
walking four blocks to his university’s memorial:
“Rita No. 8” was one of the old crude-oil pumpers,
salvaged from the East Texas Oil Field,
which endowed the university.
She represented the revolution of oil,
as the guitarist stood beside the huge
squared oak of her counterbalance,
marveling how the rig was a single tree
that paid for school.

We wondered about overdrafting the field
with roustabouts from Carolina,
waiting for Ohio to send more steel.
Could Rita remember the twenties?
And if she could, would her counterbalance beam
balance down for running our cars and utilities
or balance up for school?

We left there too, heading back to the café.
Landis asked for a legend. He needed
one — we all do — it’s freezing.
Something for a pair of guitars, and he’d pay in Guinness.

I was almost ready to leave Austin,
but my writing hadn’t shown what it needed to.
So I kept trying different things in the Asphalt Café —
tried wooden tables out of prison years based on Max Gonzales,
then I chased my son through a farm dream.
But they were put aside as I wrote for another week in the café —
alI I’d gotten was Anglo-Saxon
over Romance language and the “So What Rule.”

“You all right, Roy?”

“I’m sorry, Eleanor.”

“What’s the ‘So What Rule’?”

“Ahhh, sometimes it’s written beautifully,
doesn’t say fuck all: the ‘So What Rule.’

“Have a beer, Roy.”

Sunday morning I started writing under the middle dogs;
swerved, then began again with the phrase
the hot tar life …
writing on a pad all afternoon and into the evening.
I broke for a movie called Dr. Strangelove. Liked it.
Then finished the piece on the sidewalk that night. Liked it.
It wasn’t the legend Landis required,
just a long untitled paragraph.

I read it out loud to Eleanor
over a morning beer, an’ she liked it.

She needs more roofing, Roy, try stacking it as verse.

The next afternoon,
Intelligent Moe served Landis
a pitcher of Guinness and some little fish crackers.

Behind us on the dirty walls,
there wasn’t any legend in remove and recover —
just a dog in a woman’s arms still evolving left to right.

Landis read the first page;
I sauntered over to the middle dogs.
He ate his little fish, sipping beer,
reading, handing the pages to me when I came back —
recording the hot tar piece was my Austin close.

Landis thought those industrial guitars
should be called a “Roof Sun, Spoken” …

In an alley behind an Austin gym,
Leo is a tall, spare man with graying hair to his waist —
a grizzled beard, strong eyes, and good hands.
The old psychic belly dancer is possibly Austin’s poorest roofer —
a Kansan, his mother died when he was ten.
Leo attended Kansas State, majored in pussy, served in Vietnam.
Acting upright in a business of grime,
he converts the risk of the street into cover.
His father, Raymond, hauls the trash and tracks our hours.
Rafael’s the jefé with a hot tar mop,
leading the Spanish/English speaking crew
after eighteen years on the mop — he almost never speaks to Leo.

The tar paper and nails
are mostly put down in the heat
by Baroul, Castro, Smiley, Camey, and Rico,
Dr. Brian, Uwe, and Steve. And there is one more man
on the hoist that everyone must adjust to:
Leo’s night watchman,
tracking the homeless up and down the alley;
James is a damaged black man
living in a shanty on the roof of the gym —
maybe a prison man, maybe not.
The hot tar life is for the people outside of things.

Our comedy begins at first light,
starting awful trucks parked behind the gym;
opening sheds, pulling tools from them; loading trucks —
a simple thing complicated by our intelligence.

Leo interferes and changes much of what is done
by the gang of men untangling extension cords
or straining, shouldering rolls of modified paper.

In the truck, room is made
for John Joe Monroe if he shows.
Raymond watches; Leo shouts;
Spanish humor; starters grind; the sun rises more;
trucks start or they don’t; trees smile if trees do.

Mornings are best.

We head down the alley,
a dirty soap river speckled with tar pieces
and shingle fragments,
populated on its banks by homeless men.
Broken gas gauges on the trucks
suggest a stop up the street
at the gas station for Celia’s coffee.
Dirty men unpiling from dirty trucks,
waiting in line with pristine secretaries for coffee.

Dr. Brian studies physics and takes creative writing.
Young Steve wants to be a writer,
though his typewriter doesn’t return.
Uwe, the German, has an interest in
Hispanic women and makes fine shoes.
Pouring the rest of the crew’s coffee,
Celia ignores John Joe Monroe’s language as racist,
sexist, Harley truck beer nonsense at its best —
mindless babble the rest of the time.
Morning continues.

On the drive to the roof,
Leo’s junk engines run on loosened coil wires,
and starters hang by their threads.
We arrive; more unpiling and shouting,
backing and filling; work starts, and Leo leaves for collections
exhausted — from starting James on the hoist.

James violently exercises the rope.

Rafael’s crew enjoy the work, their humor gathers stamina.
On hot tar roofs, I’m the mule carrying hot tar buckets
hoisted from the kettle by James to Rafael on the mop.
Castro runs the kettle, and the tar releases sulfur
as it boils in the squat, evil-looking furnace on wheels,
sheathed with overflow from countless jobs.

And there’s a stench of heated hanging tar.
Its seething roil will take your face,
demanding a protocol in its care.
A deliberate haul and declaration,
so people know where the hot tar is.

A seven-foot pole mop holds fifty pounds of tar,
resting in a heavy cart that Rafael wheels about the roof —
lifting the mop against five hundred degrees
of plastic resistance;
lifting and sealing over and again;
taking years off his life for hot tar money —
a soldier of hot tar.

Rafael’s crew is smooth —
moving mechanically raises our risk; tar requires rhythm.
Baroul does all the little things well, using the kindest tone.
Rico rolls the paper and cuts it for the geography —
always moving so as not to scorch his feet.
Smiley does the metal perimeter,
anchoring the roof profusely.
Camey smears plastic, entombing the fixtures
while his face heals — injured in a fall through a roof —
his bones’ knitting helped by last night’s beer.
The kettle burned Castro’s hands
when he slipped loading a keg of tar;
working carefully now, his hands swathed;
next week he visits his young daughters in Tampico.

Work moves on in three-foot bands,
back and forth, often triple layers of paper and tar.
Unseen from below — a nameless succession of roofs,
tar stench, and heat cooled slightly by humor.
The work is its own — remove,
haul away, restore, seal … heat all week.

Return evenings to the narrow alley,
which is hard to maneuver in,
as the entire crew manhandles the kettle
into its shed — settling into its berth against the gym —
a pain in the ass as we unload everything:
stuffing, pushing, twisting ladders;
abusing tools, equipment, ourselves.

Light shines brightest then.

With greasy ledgers spread open about an office in the alley
on the trunk lid of a dead, brown Cadillac.
We turn from the hot tar life to Raymond
enthroned on an upside-down garbage can —
piles of cash for each man on the trunk lid,
weighted with cold tar pieces.
Look at the hours and the draws; pay the man his money;
pay for the tearing, the hauling, and the hot dance with the mop.
Leo hands out the money, and we leave till Monday.

The alley is quiet except for tired homeless men …

Ten hours north of Austin,
I slept by an Arkansas cotton field.
At dawn a tractor working down ends woke me.
Couple of hours down the road,
a guy had a yard full of motorcycle frames.
My Water Buffalo’s chain was worn;
but the owner said the Devil Rays had taken his,
so my journey went on.

After sundown, a wide gray river came into view —
the Arkansas was dark water large,
and I paused to roll a few Drums.
Back on the bike, I crossed the river valley —
moonlight and wind — smoking Drums
one after another behind my hand.
My plan was to stop in Kansas and see my children,
but their mother told me
they were in Fresno for another week or so.
Rebekah also said my mother was still in intensive care.
At sunrise, I slept for an hour behind a hay stand.
Entering Missouri’s Bootheel by midday;
I crossed the Mississippi into Cairo, Illinois, by late afternoon.
Then east into a triangular region called Little Egypt.
Turning north, the rest of my evening became a swampland
past random shacks and a Golconda roadhouse.
I turned around for a beer.
Inside, regulars below the levee
said they did floodplain chores for beer;
and I drank a few, writing about Devil Rays and farm dreams.

After the bar closed, I slept on some straw bales.
Packing up under full sun,
I rode north on the Coal Road —
as lower Illinois rose and fell for forty miles.
Asphalt shimmered in afternoon heat,
dividing early corn from dry yellow grain.
I parked by the grain and walked in.
It waved on my way through, and the wheat looked ready.
Across the road, corn rustled, too.
Starting the bike, I threw the chain putting it into gear —
swore at myself and began walking north.
The Coal Road ran into a wilderness
of tangled oaks and vines, until a woman
in an old GMC passed … slowed … backed up.

Was that my motorcycle back there?

It was, and I told her its chain was undone.— “Get in.”
She had some — a good-looking woman like my wife,
in overalls with a baseball cap over chestnut hair.
Her truck muttered past rotting barns, rusting combines,
and shady forest around small, greasy lakes:
they were abandoned pits filled with black water.
She’d grown up around the holes and shacks.
The Coal Road led to a hardware store,
followed by a small grain elevator against railroad tracks.
Turning in where the sign said Amish Grain,
augers were pouring old crop down into a waiting train.

Parking next to a wooden shed, she went inside,
returning with parts for 80 chain.
I thanked her and asked her who she was.
She told me her name was Esther Watson
and that she was partnered in the elevator with the Amish.

Prior to Austin, I’d been married to a Mennonite;
had two children; and I was on the way there.
After another mile, Esther asked about my marriage.
“Well, Rebekah was a Kansas Mennonite,
who moved out to California to break up large farms.
Our children were Helen and Moses.”
Esther glanced at the mirror,
passing wilderness and familiar wheat and corn,
till the oily gray Buffalo was a half mile away.
She parked; we both got out to mend its chain.
Were my folks around? — I said my mother
had lung cancer in Fresno.
Had I seen her? — Last year.
She clipped the links and stepped back,
wiping her hands with a rag;
then gravely nodded good-bye and got in the cab.
Pushed the starter switch, but nothing happened.
Raising the hood, we found a loose coil wire.
I reattached it while Esther said her harvest started soon.
They could use me at the elevator,
and there was her ruin to sleep in, too.

So I followed her battered truck
down the Coal Road, crossing bottom land
and trees till we turned up a grassy slope.
Her hilltop house and grounds were a simple affair:
tethered goats called “Jack and Jill” quietly
cropped the grass around her rock house;
black oaks shaded its rough metal roof and wide porch.
The ruin was a stone barn overflowing with grimed engines
and tools; farm pits and old coal pits completed the view.
After putting my gear inside her barn,
we sat briefly outdoors at a table under a tall arbor
of wild roses sprawled across rusty yellow-flaked motors.
Those were Amish farms below — at least the first two were
and most of those engines pumped out the shaft
mines before they switched to pits.
She stood up and said she’d let me know
when it was dinnertime. A couple hours passed,
then she called out the table was laid.

Over soup I learned Esther was a widow
whose husband had restored turn-of-the-century engines
for museums around the world.
Thomas had been gone a few years;
so we kept on talking about his aging engines
over beer and stew, till she said
goodnight and left with the dishes.

Jack and Jill watched me all the way back to their barn.
The interior was gray stone and open, aging doors.
Night sounds and moonlight
lulled me to sleep next to iron shadows.

In the morning Esther brought coffee —
we drank it between an old reaper
and a mine pumper with a huge piston.
How come the open pits were closed? — Dirty coal.
Had the Buffalo always been mine?— No,
I’d traded a rain machine for it.
Did the bike ever go fast? — No,
Noah set it for slow.

The next few days she had me
thinning oak trees until the harvest began.
My job at the Grain became unloading wagons
driven by teenage girls, whose wagons
were combinations of farm wheels and red barn siding
strapped with leather harnesses.
Esther kept her distance through the first part
of the wheat harvest. Amish horses did too,
while the elders taught me quite a bit of profanity.
And my own desert farming
was handled like a different sect.

Harvest sandwiches were made by Amish girls,
who looked with direct blue eyes and liked my beard,
while I enjoyed holding their mules.

Six days into the harvest, the younger Amish
crowd invited us to a gathering; so Esther
prepared me before sundown: The Amish protocols
had the men buy beer, then wait for women
while drinking in front of the hardware store.
Young women would leave home in smocks,
change to jeans. Everyone gathered
where the horses and buggies are hitched.

After beer, couples spun off through the fields
toward the old coal pits —
they’ll sleep together in the woman’s home
and have breakfast with her family before going to church.
The congregation watches over the protocol:
Doing it twice leads to a proposal.

We rode the motorcycle there;
drank a lot of Amish beer; rode home;
and said goodnight at two in the morning.
Alone in the barn on the cool floor by the motorcycle,
the roof was mounted on hand-hewn rafters —
they were heavy, close-grained, on their third building or so.
Illinois days had dusty wagons and gathering clouds at dusk;
but the succession of thunderstorms left us alone,
while we made a better rack for the Buffalo
and attached a hydraulic hose to a sprinkler on a ground slide.

We’d just started the Rain Bird
when she told me: Thomas got crushed under an engine,
and his ashes were scattered there.
I wondered when. — Not long before … she was forty-one.

Our evenings were spent watching her Rain Bird,
trading grassland for desert stories under leafy trees.
Mornings, Esther wore nightgowns on her porch,
watering vines in the see-through.
Another week of horse-drawn combines
finishing final fields and left unhitched on the turnrows.
Amish plows turning the old crop in.
And Esther came out to the ruined barn to ask for another ride.
We rolled south past an old tornado swath,
with circling hawks nearing the river.
And along the Ohio, we watched a barge
barely make headway.

On our way back, we stopped at a country store,
bought a couple of beers, adding up my wages
with a couple of more. On the way out the door, she asked
what had happened before Austin.
I said, “Working a movie on Jack Ruby.”
Then we rode home through darkening vine tangle
and farms, till we parked by the barn,
where Esther asked me to wait while she went into her house.

Coming back with a small journal,
she opened it to a sentence about augered grain —
it was good, and I told her so.
But all she did was whisper
the cash in the journal was mine …
leaving me alone with muted colors in the dark,
except for a garden hose curving toward a Rain Bird.

After opening its valve, my return to writing
began with wet circles on the grass.
Then I packed my gear and rolled my bike
down to the Coal Road, which had taller corn
by gray-yellow stubble.

My Kansas children were a day away;
the road shimmer was in hiatus going over the rise …

Humid summer changed to dry heat toward Wichita,
then to rolling plains where the corn was blue.
I rode past several herds of Kansas cattle
and green tractors in the fields.
Rebekah had said to turn at Asphalt Cross,
count for ten miles of rural road, and their new home
crested a hill as a half-cylinder hut covered in bramble vines.

I parked the Water Buffalo in the pasture behind her house;
found a rock tank for domestic water
and cottonwoods to shelter my campsite.

The summer school wasn’t too far, and the principal recognized me.
Helen and Moses broke from class and we met in the gym.

They called me a ragged beard,
and I was pleased by the way they’d both grown.
We shot a basketball; and my son, Moses,
had a future in the game, since his shots always went in.
Helen said she was writing summer school essays:
I had confidence in them — because I needed to.

Moses rode home on the back of the motorcycle.
Passing the farms, their neighbors
were squared-off faces with dust in their lines,
and their ideas resided in Mason jars —
like ethics captured in season.
Moses said he’d been raised on the hard clay.

That night, Rebekah’s interior meant curving walls
and old objects from my past continuing to surprise me —
scratched tables and plates, an upright piano, and so on.

I called the ranch, and found out Mom was home again.

The second evening, the children got into marital allowances,
which were remembered as twelve dollars a week.
I’d spent mine for coffee and cigarettes;
Rebekah saved hers to buy the piano.

Over the next few days,
their routine left me with time on my hands,
so I kept workin’ on a farm dream.

After dinner, Helen joined me, camped in the pasture.
Both of us were folded into a pair of green-red chairs.
Helen showed me a ten-year-old Polaroid
of herself and Moses reaching up for plates of cake:
me leaning down, my face was opaque …
theirs were six and three, streaming light from smiles.
While poking pieces in the fire, our evening faded —
Helen worried about what the settlements say,
even though I looked the same. I was divorced from her
mother long before the men’s shelter.

Was I treated well?

— I said I was.

And where they’re concerned?

— I nod in their pasture, and say I am.

We let the fire crack through the dusk change;
her horse stood outside the light, and a cat slept under my chair.

Helen asked if I ever dreamed.

“Not often, except maybe the basketball dream.”

“What happens?”

“Ball always comes on the right side of the court;
I jump to shoot; shoot and keep rising — it’s an awkward feeling
through the roof, then I lose my fear, and awake in outer space.”

“Does your shot go in?”

“I can’t say that it does.”

“Are there other dreams?”

“Well, I’m chasing Moses in a farm dream.”

“Is there music?”

“He hasn’t finished it yet.”

Then Helen told me about her own strange dream.

I asked, “What kind?”

“Well, I dreamed about the stump over there when it was a tree.”

“Not the seedlings?”

“No, just the tree that I’d never seen.”

I got up, and looked at the stump in the firelight,
again at my daughter; then I counted the tree rings
after Helen asked me to count them.
A night owl screeched overhead through the counting.

“My dream was a hundred years ago.”

“What, Helen?”

“I dreamed about a prairie woman when this was still grassland.”

“Did you need her?”

“I don’t really know if I needed her or why she came here.”

“Is your dream alive?”

“It’s after I’m gone.”

“You’ve gone away?”

“I’ve gone away, but I’m buried under the tree.
And how do you get a tree on natural grass?”

I left the stump, and sat in the chair, and asked,

“It’s a conversation under the tree?”

“Kind of.”

“You and the dream?”

“Yes.”

She turned to the complicated rock tank
with the green black algae line
running crooked to the seedlings.
I nodded for progress.

“It’s the sunburned prairie, Dad: Some of those stones
were hauled to the hillside spring to make a well.
Their work was a rough construction,
and a little water ran off — a slow constant seepage —
and the woman needed a tree; so she planted a seedling
and then channeled the leakage.”

“Helen, this is happening on the prairie?”

“Here on the Great Plains.”

“Was the woman alone?”

“Until she married.”

“Was she pleased?”

“Doesn’t matter — the woman was me and I survived my husband.”

“Who was he?”

“Just a man that went away.”

“Like me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Weren’t you lonely?”

“No. Moses stayed with me as a quiet man at home
till I died as an old woman with my tree in full view.
I’d planted it when I was thirty-one.”

“Was the tree big?”

“Tree’s huge, but my dream had Moses digging my hole.”

I looked suspiciously toward the stump.

“Where does he do this?”

“On the house side. Moses broke our saws on the roots
and dug all the rest of the night with his hands smoothing the hole,
finished by dawn; he’d made the grave signaling my life.”

“You’re at rest in the shadow?”

“I’m facing my home.”

“Jesus! — did Moses stay there?”

“Yes, he remained as a large man climbing his boyhood tree.”

“What else did he do?”

“He watched congenial birds in the walnut branches and wrote
about them over the years, wondering if I felt his new work
or heard the birds. And we talked about our kind of lives —
and the others of sensitive crows and aggressive squirrels,
taking their habits from blue jays.”

“Are there green leaves?”

“Ash green — but Moses was in good weather and waiting for contact.”

“From you?”

“No, just contact like the scattered lights
from other homes, and cold stardust,
and crooked flow from the well.”

“Helen, does Moses live?”

“No, he died when a lightning strike killed the tree.”

“What follows?”

“I woke up. And the next day we wanted some shade,
so Mom dug the holes, then we mixed half shells and leaves.”

“Who placed these seedlings?”

“It took Moses all week.”

We sat quietly while the fire burned down.

My daughter returned to the hut and I kept glancing
from coals, to the tent, then over to the seedlings.

After a last nod, I crawled into my tent.

Moses woke me from a farm dream in the morning …

My son wasn’t around the desert town.
Light spilled from a doorless frame.
I stumbled in and out of the shadows into a ragged place.
The interior had ripped Sheetrock walls
lined with emaciated small men, sweating shoulder to shoulder —
with stick legs stretched towards the center of an aqua carpet.
Quiet men smoking opium, smelling raw, heavy, and inviting.
Each man’s smoke stayed down close —
no movement showed in the humid den.
I shook one, then slapped another, asking them about Moses;
then I shook and slapped them all, asking everyone.
But he wasn’t there, so I left the desert town.

An hour later in the dark, standing beside a road,
several thousand farmworkers went to separate fields.
I tried to join the one-way procession of old dusty sedans
followed by battered vans with gear piled and roped to roofs.
But I failed and stood outside the lights,
shouting at the caravan on the way to yesterday’s field.
Then Moses roared by in a melon truck.
I ran down the oiled road after hanging wires and crooked lights —
like a runner in the gaps between the future and the past.
The future kept moving away,
while the past kept coming up my back —
till I staggered to the borrow pit,
gasping at muddy undersides with hanging tailpipes
and stray fabric on the door bottoms.
After the hidden side of tires passed,
I wondered which patch Moses was in —
fell down on the road as light gathered
below layered clouds. Then dawn never really showed
on the kind of morning that usually began with a sunrise.

But Helen’s cat wailed
as my tent snapped and rattled in the Kansas wind.
It felt like wet sweating, sitting up for a cigarette,
ashing into a Drum can. Believing in old dreams
inside new dreams and smoke.
I fell back to sleep inside more dreams as a small boy:
Hot afternoon rides through the cotton
in a dusty four-door beige Chevrolet —
body odor mixed in with the smell of wet carpet,
from leaky dash-mounted air conditioners
and Viceroy cigarette smoke —
in a wilder country with more tumble than fallow.

My father had more land than water,
and his impact sprinklers smacked the cotton —
as concise Spanish rattled from sight-line radios,
using a long antenna bolted to the back bumper,
then latched to the front, over car roofs
so they wouldn’t tear off under bridges or in trees.
They gave and received on rough roads,
made brick hard from traffic
through the overthrow of sprinkler lines.
Spilling Cokes on the hot seats,
I napped on my back in the heat,
as the car swayed and turned through the fields
for twenty years — changing me to an older boy
inside a jarring sensation of circling through turbulent air,
before slamming down hard to a stop,
by reversing some turboprops on a white King Air.
Landing down below the ledge
of a sandy hill where the old tools lived,
the airplane’s door opened —
there was hidden-away evidence of wear
and changed minds by the sound
of our north well engines and the water rotation
of ten thousand Rain Birds.

Both sides of a dry wash
had mismatched cottonwoods —
a dusty sound in the breeze as they held on
for rolling colors of exposed profiles.
Whitened dry grass struggled across the wash
on some ground made in shades of brown.
The grass lifted, and my needs changed
to new straw walkers, in an unfamiliar heavy country
where solid lines of red tractors rested
on cracked clay from drought.
I was early — an hour before the farmers’ tools
were auctioned; and I hate an auction of that kind.
Needing new crankshafts, fruit chains, and straw walkers —
maybe they were lying around in the brisk morning sun.
But all the scrawny auctioneer offered
was acid coffee, a bad taste poured on the ground.

Then Helen’s anxious cat scratched again …
waking me to a dead bird in Kansas.
Accepting her strange mangled offering,
I fell back on my sleeping bag.
And then the images hardened
into black ice on the asphalt —
with Moses calling out from some wet weeds.
A car started spinning at me and blocked the road.
Flashes of round eyes — mine, theirs —
as I veered into the corn snow.
I slid to a stop in the greasy reeds;
got off shaken, kneeling in a cold field
in a low corner stand of hollow femurs.
Moses slapped me and stopped that dream …

After mailing everything to Luthor,
I left Kansas low on money;
ran into storm clouds near the Four Corners —
where a Baptist farmer needed his hay hidden from the bank.
I worked there a couple of months,
hauling it into his canyons and had about finished
when an irrigator answered a question
I hadn’t really asked him:
the answer came when I changed his water
in exchange for something to eat.

“Hey, Clifford, I can fix these ends
if you do the cooking tonight.”

“Hell yeah, Roy, I’m hungry and thirsty;
let’s eat by the blue chairs where the canyon winds rise.
I’ll take the tractor for groceries; the trucks have died.”

“That’d be swell, Clifford.”

He drove the Farmall to the store
while I straightened his sprinkler lines.
Clifford was paid to keep
the rolling wheel lines straight and defined.
An irrigator with woman problems, he ran from all of them.
Always smiling, watching his water
through the rolling pipes as the sprinklers
started at the far end cap and back pressured
to where he stood — holding the world harmless
while his wheel lines meandered.

For ten years he’d been a sous chef
along the Wilshire Boulevard —
he was a Ute Indian everywhere else.
Clifford Leamas did fine things with corned beef hash
and washed it down nightly with most of a case of beer.
We usually slept in a trailer between
the Four Corners Point and the town of Yellow Jacket.

Our friendship was based on the poetry in Clifford’s voice.
The last evening was spent in the southeast quadrant
under the Four Corners stars
as he prepared his generous hash
and a story about stashed and oily money.

“Roy?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever have any big money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Whaddya do with it?”

“I used it to grow cotton — how about you?”

“Mmm, yeeaaah, once I had a lot of money.”

“Did you do good?”

“Maybe, I think so.”

He poured a little wine into the hash,
started working the clams in, saying,

“I wish the stars were money.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause the stars rain down on those they love.”

“Have the stars done that for you, Clifford?”

“Yes, they rained down on me in L.A.
when I got drunk at Benny’s, too drunk to see.
It wasn’t too long ago —
and I ended up on a Wilshire bench;
sat there a while before this other guy joined me.
A tall, thin man wearing pants inside his boots.
We sat quietly on the bench ends, watching the street —
he first, then me, asleep. I woke up at dawn, day to come,
the city starting. Deliveries were being made,
busloads humming and going.
The tall thin man started up, too,
giving everything a nodding wide smile.
He left on the six a.m. downtown — we never spoke.
In about twenty minutes, a fog moved in, bringing a chill.
I saw that he’d forgotten his coat, an old green driller.”

Clifford’s stirring stopped when he asked,

“Roy, how much hash you want?”

“Lots.”

He returned to stirring, then glanced skyward:

“Roy, some of these stars are curling coming down.”

“A few, it’s busy tonight, I don’t know why.”

Our Four Corners night
was full of light shards from far away.
Infrequent streamers sailed over our heads,
crossing west over the mountains.
Shipping affection beyond our horizon, Clifford said.
He returned to his hash and story, saying,

“I carried that coat — a driller — with me up the street,
the moon lowered over the end of Wilshire
before the fog completely covered.
Sleep-cold and fog-chilled, I put it on as I walked away.”
“It smelled faintly of earth and maybe wine
and had sort of marks or arithmetic on one of the sleeves.”

“You always talk like this telling a story?”

“Every time, Roy — I’m a perfected Ute in a rhythm
under the full moon, and we’ve got chips in the sky
and a crackling fire to warm this hash.
We’ll eat it and wash it down with spirits.”

We ate gift hash together;
it was magnificent, chased with more beer;
bellies full, resting on smelly old recliners,
as galaxies susaned slowly overhead.
The sky seemed to close as I wondered
about Ute story traditions. Would Clifford follow this one,
or would he lazy back trailing this alone to his own horizon?

“Roy?”

“Mmm … ”

“Wearing that drab coat all through the weekend
made me feel good — loquacious is what I was.
Went all over town talking to folks,
like when I quit tending sheep
in North Dakota. Damn words just poured outta me.
Met this mystic Iranian film student from Montreal —
we talked most of Sunday about landed spirits …
whether they come from above or below.”

“Where do they come from?”

“It depends, Roy, the spirit water mostly from above.
Sometimes it travels the seams to where you live.
Larger forces control these things,
and they’re inside of memories.”

“Memories?”

“Yeah, memories are the stay-behinds
and spiritual lessons connecting time and life forms.”

“Come on, Mr. Leamas, what’s that mean?”

“Collections … recollections of aged hues
flowed on a rough raised surface or ocean-made winds,
wearing that mountain shape down to her base.”
Or me telling this story to you — a traveler — an event
happened far and away and told now.
We’re in a surveyed land, all right:
but you’re from somewhere,
and I’m from here — where these stars
are pretty constant teachers,
listeners, no matter who we are.”

“Okay, Clifford.”

“I kept talking to the film student.
She told me I was a beautiful man —
no one’s ever said that to me.”

“You surely are, Clifford.”

The story paused as he gazed
down at the fire, reshaping the embers.
The glow increased on the round-faced little man
with shaggy eyebrows and a missing tooth.
Clifford’s eyes warmed over the fire with affectionate film
running in his mind; his profile showed insight and confusion.
We both laid back and watched the sky breathe —
in the altitudes the cosmos is richer, fuller, and alive.

“Well anyway, Roy, I wore that coat through the weekend
and into work; hung it where the dishes get cleaned.
Everybody sliced, and tossed,
and sprinkled for the next three days.
I almost forgot the coat hung wet over the washing machines.
Hill fires were doused in the rains that week.
Pouring outside when I finished my shift,
so I reached for my damp coat, on the way out the door,
noticing a paper sticking out of the inside pocket.
I put the driller coat on going to Benny’s.
It was a loud rain, sheeting sails of rain.”

“Not bad, Clifford.”

“At Benny’s, I talked to the Strolling Bimbo
about horses a bit — mudders mostly.”

“Who?”

“She’s a woman likes to spend her time at the track —
owned a piece of a horse named Strolling Bimbo,
so we called her that.
I used to love her till I broke my leg,
feeling awkward about my cast and exposed toes —
she wasn’t a healing spirit, Roy.”

“Go on.”

“After the rain stopped,
she made me uncomfortable,
talking up a horse named Terror Orange.
Guess I drank some; then went outside for a walk —
head down walking right into that bench,
and I cracked my knee on the angel bone …
and fell off the yellow curb
on my face in the street. Got up on the bench,
and my knee was just growing:
It hurt like hell; I cried like a child with my nose running,
feeling sad and lonely.
I reached into the drab driller for a smoke —
don’t know why … I quit years before.
When I did, I found this package — bag-wrapped, solid,
but not too thick —
you’ve been afraid?”

“I am now, Clifford.”

“Well, I was scared, damn spooky;
white-light night-street; a forty-two-year-old Ute cook,
alone, childless; a gin-fooled lover of used women;
and my knee swoll up like a big tuna.”

“Are Utes afraid of writing?”

“Like snakes that fly: I’m a talkin’ Ute.”

“What about the package?”

“Ripped it open, and found forty-one $100 bills inside.
I sat there — shocked, stunned, like a newly shorn sheep
on a cold sellin’ day — just staring at the money.
My knee still hurt; so there’s no such thing as painless cash.
Lookin’ and feeling completely suspicious,
I limped off the Wilshire into safety
in the men’s stall at Benny’s.
Closed the door and thought it over, checkin’ it out —
there were lines drawn in the wrapping,
and between the lines were words.”

“What words?”

“Plea take this Runway Coyote Cash and go to Victorville.”

“Say it again?”

“Plea take this Runway Coyote Cash and go to Victorville.”

“What did you do?”

“Took the cash and stayed the hell away from Victorville.”

“All right, Clifford.”

He looked through me for a time;
got down by the fire out of the wind — it was warmer there.

“You know something … I sure feel you do.”

“Maybe I did — maybe again tonight, Clifford — keep going.”

“I left on the southern bus trails outta L.A.
The money weighed good and smelled sort of oily.
Gambled with it in the desert
and won some for the only time.
I kept it and bought an old Yamaha
for the ride to Colorado —
before camping up around Mancos,
in the Blind Horse Canyons.
Cold, so I wrapped up in that fatigued driller.
It also had marks on the sleeve that led me to believe
the money was part of a larger whole.
I made fires, and sweated, and swam. I didn’t think:
I pondered. After a week, I went to the reservation
to see my grandmother —
she’d raised my sister alone — I told her some of it.
She doesn’t know about my life,
she feels it; so I gave her the money to use.”

“How’d that work out?”

“I did good: My sister traveled on some of the money;
now she lives in Moab and paints elders
smoking around fires. You’d enjoy Linda, too, Roy.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Listening to the molten coals quietly settle,
our night canopy rained old time through us.
Clifford watched me get up and wander
over to the canyon edge. I gazed across
the moon-yellowed abyss; couldn’t see anybody
or anything and leaned out over it.
The wind took my hat straight up — all ways.
The upwind brought changed sound from far away,
maybe long ago. I was just about complete … aired out,
leaned back, and returned to the fire.

Clifford stretched supine on the ground near the heat.
In the still, that unusual wind — a foot over his head.
I gathered and settled also; then we just peered
at each other, and opened two more beers,
and studied them … but they didn’t teach us much.

“You know, Clifford, this fire’s almost done —
those white ashes remind me, looks like driller’s paste.
Driller’s mud partly comes from ground-up money.
I’ve heard our Treasury Department
grinds up the cash and sells it
as a constituent product to manufacturers.
A guy named Gino buys some
and makes Gino’s Well-Driller’s Mud.
Gino’s mud saves wear on the well-driller bits
and cleans their well walls, even on the deep holes —
according to a Polish stand-up bass player
and well-driller’s son.”

We studied our beer a little more till Clifford asked,

“Do you know something about this? I feel that you do.”

“Something — yeah, a lot, I do — but it’s okay.
You told it right, and a fine thing came out of the transfer.”

“Roy, why are you here hiding hay from the bank?
Do you come from things, are you going back,
or are you running? What, Roy?”

“My mother is dying in Fresno.”

“Will you be on time?”

“I’ll try.”

“Aren’t you in pain?”

“No, I’m just hiding alfalfa while my life cures out of sight.”

“Go on, Roy.”

“We’re here thinking of what you called ‘stay-behinds’ —
both thinking the other guy feels their memories are weird,
both knowing they aren’t, Clifford.”

“That’s no answer.”

“No, it’s not — but what’s this coat about, this driller thing?”

“Hell if I know — I just liked the word.”

“Where you got it?”

Clifford went to the trailer and returned
with an old, ragged, oil-stained fatigue jacket.
I held it close and looked it over. It smelled of grayed sweat,
distant earth, and red wine, with a fresh overlay of beer.

“Did you say the man on the bench smiled?”

“Yeah, almost a headshake grin.”

“How much did you win?”

“Almost $15,000.”

I looked up at the chips in the wheel sky.

“Noah Ingram left that cash on the bench,
Clifford. Noah did that.”

“How do you know?”

“As a boy I became friends with a marine.”

“Where?”

“Noah was in between Asian combat tours,
working in a summer boy’s camp
when he taught me to high jump —
before returning to Indochina and the wars,
which almost destroyed him.
Asia used up his humor and his God —
and made him afraid of memories or the stay-behinds.”

“What was he like?”

“A loner — I never completely understood
— a really sad, killed person.Sometimes
he’s a metal sculptor in a place called Devil’s Den,
and he’ll spend the fall in the winery crush as an oiler.
Noah calls wages ‘Runway Coyote Cash.’
When you said headshake grin, that meant ‘Noah Ingram.’”

“I’m a drunk Ute outta the wind, Roy, running from wives,
ex-wives, and girlfriends. I’ve always thought beer
or uneven sprinklers, except when I see
across the hollow land. Noah had that look —
maybe he could see that far,
maybe he’s right for it … I’m not.
It’s usually a pain in the ass.
My grandmother’s that way: sees fields and events,
sort of. I got some of that from her,
but it adds up to ‘screw up’ with me.”

“Maybe, maybe not — you didn’t lose the coat,
not see it, or give it to the beer fairies.”

“Why, aren’t you surprised, Roy?”

“Noah could have been building guilt on the rundown …
ready to unload. Maybe you just had a good face —
you do, you got one. And I guess
he slept with you on the bench,
maybe thinking you’d perform all right.
Whatever. He left the coat with the money.
There’s not much accidental about this —
that motorcycle I ride was his.”

“Why runway coyote cash?”

“He was kind of a medic on the Laotian Plain of Jars,
where ashes and old teeth
are memorialized in clay containers.
He used to have a clay jar, ash full
with a couple of old teeth settled in it.
He could have given you that —
instead, he gave out wandering cash
and something for you to do.
So you got some of both, Clifford.”

“You’re talkin’ strange teeth from Asian plains —
you going back to any truth?”

“It’s diminishing.”

“The sleeve?”

“I’m getting tired.”

“The sleeve, Roy?”

“Those marks list the things he may have wanted to do.
My guess is he might have just meant
to confuse you with the Victorville.
He probably hoped a good thing would happen.
It did: a restart for you, and your sister is painting in Moab.”

Clifford rearranged the fire while I looked behind me
and reached for a stone and put it by the fire ring
in the southeast quadrant; his eyes expanded.

“You know from who about marking stories with stones?”

“Noah … others.”

He nodded, and then again, when I wondered,

“Clifford, can you ask your sister
to paint a smiling man by a stone-ringed fire for me?”

“Sure, Roy, I’ll tell Linda when it’s aged and right.
I know you’re leaving soon, but you come back when you can.
And when you do, you check by the reservation or Moab.”

Our sky lightened
as the stars faded. It was almost a windless time
for the dawn water changes. I’d hidden all the hay
from the farmer’s creditors. Couldn’t find my hat.
I hope to see Clifford Leamas again; and when I do,
I’ll tell him whatever I learned about Noah Ingram.

Maybe get my hat back …

My mother was almost gone that fall,
when a place called Mule Hollow
took my motorcycle over the edge.
My wreckage got sold to a Durango Mormon.

Then a Mormon couple hired me as their evening dishwasher,
between forklift days stacking in a warehouse
and late nights sleeping in a radio station.

Needing transportation, I bought another hat
and walked to the edge of Durango.

Right away, Alvin saw me on the side of the road
and gave me a ride over the Wolf Creek Pass,
to another faded Water Buffalo in Guymon, Oklahoma.

Agreeing to buy Alvin’s motorcycle,
I paid it off driving a corn truck in Liberal, Kansas,
for a struggling grower who was maimed and broken by debt —
and kept farming from his crutches.

Back in Guymon once more,
Alvin’s documents were delayed,
which got me drinking beer in a bar.
Off to the side, a few sleeveless guys,
shooting stripes and solids,
kept going back and forth to the bathroom for cocaine.

They laughed at me as an Amish biker
in a place where it’s “What’s wrong with you?”
Should have just paid the goddamned tab;
instead, said I’d farmed in California
before doing a little writing and buying Alvin’s motorcycle.

They backed me into a corner
and called me an “undercover asshole.”
I bounced a blue ball off a guy’s head
and left the Panhandle on the second Buffalo with dangerous tags.

Ball bounced kind of wrong in Guymon.

The second Buffalo ran well in the dark into Kansas.
After Helen and Moses beat me at cards at midnight,
my father called and told me about my mother’s coma.

I abandoned my children at noon.

The first hundred miles were clear skies,
till towering clouds arranged wind and snow
on the eight hundred miles to Flagstaff.
Coming down from the mountains,
my right-hand exhaust loosened
on a long, rough, gravel road —
and the weather warmed in the desert.

An hour later, along the Highway 10,
truck mechanics made straps to seal the cracks.
Furthermore, John, my attorney,
paid the bill and took me to lunch
at the Café of Both Marias.

A few hours later, I was tired …
fueled, and repaired across the Mojave.
A strap snapped, and I lost the whole
pipe — end over end — on another gravel road.
Climbing out of the desert into the mountains;
then back down into Bakersfield.

Explosive engine noise rebounding off the overpasses;
right-side flames singeing my clothes
through the bitter night fog to the Fresno closing.

My father stepped out of the room where his father died,
saying my mother didn’t have much of a future.
She died hour after hour, just past midnight —
on their forty-second anniversary.
A few whiskey bottles and nights passed,
before we gathered by the hole in the ground —
a family around a mother of eight, with one dead and one away.
Filling in the grave, I recalled
my mother and sister on softly curving rides —
year after year, ride after ride, across sunlit afternoons
water runs, cattle shacks, and shady trees — as the hole got filled …

So he got an all-night ride
through a voluntary jail and  hot tar crew;
then across the prairies and over the mountains
toward the death of my source.

By sunrise, I’d told Luthor about Noah
giving money to strangers.
Concerned, the poet wanted to find the reason why —
asking me to stay while he did:  therefore Luthor was away.

While he was gone,
my writing went on as morning black down low to gray
reminded me of Noah helping Luthor read my tea leaves —
saying I was gonna hurt someone;
which worried and pissed me off for quite a while.
But I’d been careful all along, because
I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
Even though Luthor believed Noah might have been
onto something — just got his verb wrong …

The “Cheney Spoken” began on a shopping bag
with a series of sprinkler lines as late fall turned crisp and cold.
The revisions were mostly done at night around an open fire.
Luthor’s landlady, Rena, always called out from next door to
lower the fire, or I’d be trapped in burning bamboo.
But my revisions went on till the dry cold turned to warm afternoon.
Word-tired and restless, my writing stopped, and I could hear
Rena through the fence, swearing at her weeds.

“Rena?”

“Who’s there?”

“Roy.”

“Roy, who?”

“From Luthor’s.”

“So?”

“I’m going up by the dam to look for words and language —
you want to come with me on the motorcycle, Rena?”

“Which dam?”

“The north one.”

“All right.”

I waited while Rena changed. When she arrived,
I told her it was a motorcycle.

“I wanna wear the fuckin’ dress.”

“Okay, Rena.”

We rode out of town, quietly heading north on the 41
as sunset darkened the roses in front of Marilyn’s vineyard.
We didn’t speak, we just rode.

I didn’t know her well.
She’d suffered mountains of abuse,
sometimes revisiting them.
A green-eyed blonde, wearing a
canvas brown dress,
she worked as a registered nurse
at the woman’s prison in Chowchilla.

She smelled of sage smoke and sweat.
I was poor.
The motorcycle had loud, straight car pipes —
Rena liked that.

We turned at the sawed-off mountain
and came to Rafchieller’s abandoned feedlot
on our right side.
Rena commented on the empty pens,
wondered where the cows were.
I told her Raymond hated cows;
shut it down when the market dropped.
He’s living with his boyfriend in Three Rivers now.

As the dusk went away
we stopped and walked into pistachio groves,
as she told me things about herself … others.
She’d married young; she had a son, a good one;
he wanted to be an artist.
Her ex-husband worked in a prison —
the real kind.
But she never loved him.

“Do you love pistachios, Rena?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, they’re pretty late around here —
another month till they split open. Let’s climb to the top.
Dr. Wills’s hill doesn’t produce as well, but the nuts are better.”

“Who’s hill?”

“Dr. Wills was a wealthy gynecologist and really big farmer.
He exceeded his dreams and his partners.
Two hundred limited doctors own this land, Rena:
fifteen cents on the dollar.”

“To hell with doctors, Roy — look on down there.”

From the high ground at night above four miles of pistachios,
you could look up to the dam — backlit, white-flowing —
or downstream, moving water banked by other groves
and hayfields mostly. We carried our stolen nuts away.

Then she wanted to go in to the town of Millerton.
We couldn’t — there’s eighty feet of water over it.
I did show her the old courthouse and the graveyard.

“They moved those before they built the dam, Rena.
The old town and houses are under the lake.
Once in a while, something comes up, but it usually stays down.”

It was in the old graveyard
that she mentioned Thailand and her plans to go back.

“I want to make scents for my living —
It’s why I’ve got those woodstoves plumbed over my balcony.
I do my trials and burn things there.
I’ll go back to Thailand and buy my materials raw;
I’m saving my money to go.
I stay away from people — except my son — at least I try to.
The prison work is hard for me,
and the women are just awfully goddamned vicious.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they’re tired and ugly — even the beauties.
The whining, the gossip: it’s pretty sad and depressing.
I could show you one day if you want.”

“No, I’ll leave those women alone, Rena.”

Then walking into the cemetery, I asked about her husband.

“Danny was a prison guard. I left after a long whore of a marriage.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t go.”

“It’s over, Roy — he’s dead now.”

Inside the silent graveyard under dark oak trees,
I told her about an old black rainfall woman
who’d called cemeteries “stick bone places.”
Rena shivered, and then a little later
said she used to blow Danny
on the grass in the middle of Fresno Street.

“Are you living better now?”

She kissed me.

Rena was extremely graceful in the gravestones,
whispering “Aqua Bernal 1888 to 1933.”
Quietly wished her well in the gray monuments.
With great care and attention we read more names —
Burford, Mathieson, Blasingame, Walls — all buried once and again.
The last was Otis Diefenbach.

We went on with the ride,
going along the old flume right-of-way
and across the river valley.

“Let’s go on a little higher, take the 29 Mile Road.
There’s a saloon up by the Bass cutoff —
you want to stop for a beer?”

“I feel like shaking this hair out.
I’ll buy, Roy. That’s Dick’s Bar — have you drunk there?”

“No, I just heard about it.”

Riding together through air warmed twice by thermals
as the road crossed creeks,
she enjoyed having a good night, untethered,
and tapped me on the shoulder, saying she needed to pee.
So we stopped and peed in unison:
me over a ledge, Rena beside — squatting, giggling,
thighs shaking, gorgeous for a time. We left.
I liked her.

Up at the end of the 29 Mile Road,
a cheap motel glowed across from Dick’s —
which seemed safer
since his frontage was crammed with Harleys.
I didn’t want my second Buffalo destroyed
and didn’t much like Harleys either.
Then parking in the courtyard,
a raccoon fell hard off a trash can —
so we left her as guard over the bike.

Crossing the street, Dick’s windows showed grime flakes.
We heard filtered noise, and it looked thick hot in there.
Outside on the blacktop, we talked about my marriage:

“I was, Rena … not anymore.
Married a fine woman, and learned things too —
Rebekah, she was a political activist.”

“How so?”

“She came out here to break up large farms.
I was opposed — it’s how we met.
It’s all gone now; and I’m glad we married.”

“That’s all?”

“Aren’t you thirsty, Rena?”

We went into Dick’s cauldron bar where
the bartender’s name was Rose Anna from South Africa.

“I’ll watch those helmets here under my bar,
and wipe the bugs, too.”

“Not tonight Rose Anna, but thank you.”

Rena ordered a pitcher, grinning at my raised eyebrows.

“You can’t drink Guinness?”

“Well, once when I wrote a piece for Guinness,
they drank most of the stout.”

The music was good, some money-guns thing.

“It’s about this kid, Roy:
Goes to Cuba … gets in with the Commies
and stuff … in over his head. Calls dad for help —
send money, guns, and lawyers.
It’s the main thing of the song.”

She poured.

“Drink up, Roy.”

We drank, drank more, talked a lot, listened to “Soldier Boy.”
Rena said she’d played volleyball on the B team
while her father wrote $10,000 checks to strangers —
the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
She nursed and loved him for five years …
five years of brain strands slowly clouding and dying.
Her mother ran off with another guy,
because he was a good provider like her dad.

Rena met Danny about then:
a good-looking, bitter man; maybe a hitter.
She was like a lot of women born in the early fifties —
raised one way, for men, so to speak.
The world diminished the men, and the velocity scours the Dannys;
so the Renas make their own way with almost grown sons.
And the time was passing on.

Music was still pulsing in the loud smoky room.
Rose Anna brought us another glistening Guinness pitcher —
I liked Rose Anna.

Rena asked what was I writing.

“A farm piece about where sprinklers come from.”

“Luthor says, you’ve written about what you’ve seen or heard.”

“Maybe so, another journey
would be good, Rena — I need the distance.”

“Why, are you chased?”

“No, but the farming’s weakened —
we’ve matured so badly in the ‘One Man, One Vote’
and our ethics have gone to hell.”

Dick’s Bar was jammed all around us —
a raucous narrow place with big, open doors on the ends.
The long bar on one side was a bedlam herd of grazing, loud drunks.
On the other were scarred, uneven pool tables, full of people —
mostly pretense playing, ass gazing, and hustle stroking.

Rena liked the pool hall and bar. Combined,
it felt close and familiar; and her eyes warmed in the heat.
We lost three games. Then she began blazing, running hot tables.

An unruly mountain booze-and-speed crowd gathered.
Money was coming in, and I wanted to get the hell away.

“Can’t manage the crazies; we’re in the working Sierra.
See all the colors? I’d just get my head kicked in.
This is a mountain bar in a hell country of miscues and misfits, Rena.”

So we moved off down where the drinks were made,
by the loudest group shouting under the ceiling’s greasy fan:
Four or five men — stupid, drunk, throwing insults at Rose Anna.
A night crowd from the dam, with red, wet eyes —
staring at the hair under her armpits, and then through her dress.
They hadn’t slept in a week, substances keeping them awake.
So we left; and on the way outdoors, Rena asked if I ever knew them.

“No, they’re just searching
through those deep hell tunnels for water flow.”

Then while crossing to the Buffalo
she wondered if I was being sly about the cheap motel.

“Maybe so, it’s a long walk home.”

Then back at the bike, the raccoon
had completely chewed my seat to foam.
I accidentally hit the kill switch,
and the motorcycle wouldn’t start till I switched it on.
Rolling downslope into second and go,
we noticed the pistachios were missing —
raccoons have balls.

Our beer haze lightened,
coming down out of the mountains
with a night wind blowing against us
into the average blackeye country.
Blackeyes were beans, as rabbits quickly crossed our headlight,
and Rena showed the way along Bandoni’s canal —
which curved and coursed to a Whitney rise.

Below us, we could see the prison for women
on the east side of Chowchilla. I parked to restart.

She straddled my seat while
I laid in the dry cattle grass and wind,
listening to hard-woman Rena stories —
also about bitch convicts demanding to see the nurse.
I imagined confined women’s pasty faces,
sleeping twins with yanked hair.

I guess the darkness was moving to twilight,
so I told her a story about a huge, hairy man:
a young heart surgeon who developed a new procedure —
a saving one, he hoped.
Twelve terminal people died using it;
he’d operate, and they’d die.
Then there were two small children:
The first, a boy, just faded.
The doctor — almost shattered —
cried after he told the young boy’s parents.

He canceled the surgery for the second
child — a girl — and he went home to his wife,
who took him fishing, cradled him in a small boat.
A large, brilliant, crying man — a husk — he grieved,
cried more with her, and hated medicine and surgery.

“Good Christ, what happened, Roy?”

“The wife — you’re a nurse — she got him to go back.
The procedure was flawed only in its timing: they corrected that —
the girl lived. It’s part of heart surgery now.”

“Where was the doctor from?”

“The man was from Minnesota.”

More stories carried us from the dawn
into sunrise over the Chowchilla Woman’s Prison.

Then on our way through the hills,
a storm was building while I was musing —
maybe Rena, too — about the words,

White River flowing sprinkler ground,
rainfall black woman, Rena’s prison,

… the real kind — as we beat the weather home,
and we closed each other’s doors …

An hour west of Fresno
the Cheney Pump Station,
rose from an elbow plain on the oil line
from Bakersfield to east Bay —
a stark green-metal pump house,
with opaque, wired windows and a tall,
cable-braced smokestack.Inside was the oil pumper,
a loud reciprocating stationary engine

like the sister-ship engine to the south
twenty miles at Halfway House.

Someone needed to live out there watching things,
so the local oil company hired Dave Cheney
to manage the engine and pumps.
Sometimes Dave would get drunk
and heave off his legs to show the kids his stumps.

By 1947 an arid rabbit run
surrounded the pump station for several miles.
Then as postwar deep-well cotton approached the mountains,
my parents married and bought
some of the elbow plain and leased the rest.
Everyone called it “the Cheney Ranch” —
even Dave up at the oil-line pumps.

My parents built a flat shack next to a Hindu camp —
that shack still exists, leaning from the south wind.
Early on the land was slipshod surveyed
by Irvins and Woodrows.
They ripped it with yellow chisels;
then dragged landplanes across it to smooth.
Dusty truck odometers laid out boundary roads
for electric power arriving through wires on creosote poles —
legally wonderful poles for thirty years,
till that pain in the ass Louis the Bra sued,
forcing everyone to backslide and correct their origins.

It’s why the poles and wires
cross fields now, instead of on the turnrows.

Those sections needed deep wells
to change from desert to farm,
so you got filthy men under lonely towers —
drilling two-thousand-foot holes cased with bad postwar steel.
Weakened casings at the perforations,
those first deep wells collapsed when pumped — abandoned.
Drilling crews were asked to move over,
redrill, and case with better steel.

It takes patience, please …
to fill the cylindrical space between casings
and well walls with packed pea gravel,
there’s math involved.
If all the gravel doesn’t surround the casing,
well walls won’t filter and the well dies as a sand pumper.
But if all the gravel packs in the hole, plus a little more,
then long useful deep well lives are lived.
I don’t mean to confuse —
they’re such essential holes in the desert
on the corners of every square mile.

The wells bored down into deep aquifers of ancient water
developed late in the evenings under car lights.
Inside the glow, transplanted Punjabis and Oklahomans
unloaded electric motors, which were copper-wrapped magnets.
Also overcoming the tonnage of Peerless pumps
and forty-foot screwed tubes and shafts —
they’re turbines with impellers inside staged bowls,
lifting and removing salty gray water.

Tractor and irrigation crews
workin’ up and preirrigating sections all summer.

Soon a land collapse began, as shallow aquifers became caverns.
Night tractors disappeared. Exhausted, dusty drivers climbed
from ravines every morning. Eventually the grade
of the elbow plain subsided and fell into rolling hills.

The Cheney was a trap in the subsidence country.

Insolvency in the desert heat.
Hindus with thirty thousand siphon hoses
workin’ both ways from the surveyed crowns
of open ditches to barley or cotton on shifting hillsides.
Main and drain ditches broke down and rearranged slopes.
Ditch breaks were repaired by muddy men while the wells ran —
dangerous to shut down a deep well.

Who knows?
Falling water may unscrew
seven hundred feet of hanging pump.
Swedging’s a waste of an expansion tool —
it means fishing for pumps and losing a swedge:
then you got a worthless swedge down the hole.
It’s crowded.

Winter water, back and forth from barley
and cotton preirrigations, followed by safflower in the spring,
since you can’t ever shut down the deep wells.

The cotton water started in June.
Blooms that survived the shed became bolls;
matured through Labor Day; then got picked and sold.

Always productive, tough to farm, and unlucky —
the Cheney was ours if anything ever was.

Over time, my father imagined hand-moved sprinkler lines
watering the Cheney, instead of hundreds of miles of open ditches.
So the Rainbirds came from industrial desolation
where an Italian carrot grower had sprinkler trials.

They tried portable steel mainlines with bolted flanges,
requiring eight men to make them portable.
Assembled across the middle,
they usually stayed there in the weeds.
The attached sprinkler laterals were made
of thirty-foot joints broken down and moved by Hindus
in deep-well thermal mud to the midthigh.
Changing a dozen quarter-mile lines a day for a dollar a line,
as sun-heated steel burned the hands of line movers.
The Cheney was watered from above by 1953.

Not long after I was born,
the federal portion of the State Water Project
agreed to deliver the Sacramento River
across the lower end of the ranch along the 325-foot elevation.

The canal divided the pattern of things,
as various legal interests resided above and below its course:
the Cheney mostly to the west; and above, the divide.
Clean project water would replace the ruinous salty deep wells,
which could be discarded, abandoned, and sealed.
The federal bureau condemned a right-of-way
and purchased crops within from the ranch in 1968.

Project water moved to the Cheney
through the Manning Avenue buried line —
welded and covered by Leo and Cleo of the Horner Bros.
Those wells became forgotten history —
perforated ghost holes to the dead, resistant seabed.

But the Cheney’s what we’re talking about.
The water came too late.

I come from some of those things …

The “Cheney Spoken” was mostly done,
and Luthor was still away, while warm winter rains
kept pounding the Sierras from the south.
When the storm cleared, all the snowpack was gone.

But needing to see if the poem was right,
I rode an hour west past the Russian town and salt flats.
Bridges still held across the slough,
and people were retrieving their things.
Stopping to roll a Drum on the last bridge —
the cemetery was covered in water
and the only tree was missing.
Smoking, I leaned over the rail
and found it against the pilings,
with quiet water lapping at the leaves.
I left, shaking my head at mobile pepper trees.

Climbing fifteen miles further west
through winter grain and sugar beets;
then I made a southern turn along
the water right-of-way to L.A.
Every couple of miles were bridges across the canal,
and my parents’ old shack on the Cheney Ranch
was twenty minutes away.
Mist ahead sheathed the Coast Range,
and the land below was made by wandering streams.

I passed gently rolling tomato beds
into the subsidence country.
Unnatural hills had vacant labor camps,
and the junkyards grew weeds.
Several fields of unplanted cotton beds
used lines of golf course guns,
shooting evaporative rainbows halfway into the next day.

In the heavier land to the southeast,
my aunt’s unhappy groves cleared the horizon.
Most of my people were alive in the desert —
or dead under shady trees.

Stopping to roll Drums, I smoked one,
and continued past a row of red tractors for sale —
the International kind that don’t shift well.

The canal veered slightly for constant grade;
ahead, someone was fishing for carp.
I smiled because Woodrow, my father’s old welder,
used Camel butts for bait.

Riding closer, I saw it was a friend, Earl Rollinherd,
who’d worked the parts counter for International Harvester —
you know, those red tractors for sale.

“Hey ya, Red Earl, how ya doin’?”

“Goddamn, is that you? We heard you were dead;
heard lots of things — trouble, Roy. You all right?”

“Been off and away doing motorcycles around, Earl.
I don’t farm anymore — been thinking about writing.”

“You ought to, goddamn right —
the dust’s coming, Roy, and your people did so much —
it’ll all go to hell.”

The south wind gusted a little more.

“It’s there now, Earl. Gotta punctuate it somehow.”

Earl was as wrinkled as the land.
His suntans looked holed and worn,
and his glasses were askew.
Said his wife had passed three years before —
buried her outside of Russian town by the pepper tree.
I just nodded at the canal,
while Earl shaded a color grayer at the water —
pulling at his line, as he kept winding it in.

“Roy, I got my yellow Buick working for your dad,
and met your mother as a young woman
wearing pearls in the hell hole.
Rains came, and our cars screamed the Christ outta there.
Tires chained to go in the mud: pavement’s twenty-one miles away.”

Pausing to throw his line, he watched it land.
Then he asked if Mom survived.
I said no.

“Your mom’s gone — that’s too bad.
She was a good one: woman had dust — that shack.”

My mother’s death embarrassed him a little;
so he waved his cracked hands, a finger missing on the right one …
so he wove into his sense of how jerry-rigged things were.

Working every day in the heat, irrigating off hill ditches —
a fuckin’ nightmare. Goddamn nights spent fixing ditch breaks
with lost bulldozers in the salt mud — or plowing the
shit outta the ground, then dragging it to smooth.

“You weren’t alive for those old cart planters
tied behind a crawler and taken out to flat plant:
tool bars, six gangs of two rows behind the pull crawlers.
Those twelve rows looked a mile wide,
with twenty-foot hanging markers outside.
Don’t kill the power pole turnin’, man.
Good day, thirty poles flat planted, sundown.
Hope the wind don’t blow up your butt crack, take it away.”

Always behind the smell of beer, old kinds as Earl talked on.

“Roy, you know the story of Ostraller’s Big Kid?”

“Yeah … yes, I do. Gotta run, Earl. Take care. Good-bye.”

Clouds gathered as I came off the canal …
circling hilly sections one by one, half of them fallowed
because of redefined surface water rights.
Deep wells were groaning for cotton and small grain.

Then the Cheney undulated through
unpruned vineyards and a section of garlic.
Enduring wet lines of ambiguous garlic,
the clove divides became mud-rutted middles,
and a few led to the broken shells of twin gins.

Old men with garlic dangling from their necks to stem the evil.
A nation needs garlic in the rotations.

I rode up above the 500-foot mark across I-5.
Weather building both ways over the land
forced me to time the storm break.

Deep loam falling away into several farms.
I saw too much lease to hold and not a good place to farm
since the water rights had gone to L.A.

That shack — my parents’ first home —
leaned with the wind four miles southeast of me.
I remembered split pictures of a hard dirt road
lined with thousands of barley sacks,
leading to the two rooms of that flat shack.
The air was clearest then — not a tree for fifteen miles.

I wondered if the legs still showed inside old boundaries.
In those days, the Cheney grew skip-row cotton —
four rows in, four out; the Feds paid us for the outs,
we sold the ins on the domestic market.
Half the ranch cotton striped. Four-row cultivate
on the ins, and run a disk up the outs to get the weeds.
Good men could do six poles a day, sundown.

When the sprinklers arrived,
it was productive — but still hard farming.
The Cheney was known for its exotic crew.
I remembered morning gatherings at the shop —
Hindus, and Leo, and Cleo, and Woodrow Wilson Jones.

Woodrow was a butt crack who welded when things broke.
If that didn’t work, he cut it with a torch; if that didn’t make it go,
Woody spit a mouthful of snuff on it and called it “a mare’s ass.”

The Cheney tried growing cannery tomatoes,
sprinkled up from tiny seed down on your knees
as spring winds crossed beige ground.
Checking brown seed rows.

The summer harvest was hard.
Tomato harvesters were shaking machines
full of belts and chains driven by Model-A engines;
dusty forklifts; huge crews sorting out greens;
breakdowns; wheel tractors and harvesters stuck on ditch lines.
Six weeks of sunrise to sunset.
Endless repairs to machines parked in mudholes,
after Hindu boys washed them down with fire hoses every night.

Our first year was all right,
so the tomato acreage expanded.
Cannery died the second year,
leaving the Cheney unpaid after the harvest.
Summer rains brought crop failure the third year.
Tomato scald and a weak world cotton market followed.

… And we’ve almost come to Ostraller’s Big Kid —
a civil, evil kind of guy.

The Westside ranch was staggered by two disastrous tomato crops —
also wallowing in a bad cotton market, with all its cash
tied up in immature Eastside citrus.
In the wake of tomato failure,
a tenth of the Cheney cotton acreage
was on the right-of-way sold to the Bureau.
They owned the crop within, and the Cheney acted as agent
to protect the Bureau’s interests.

Ostraller’s Big Kid’s idea was a stroke of genius —
the only one he ever had: Steal the federal cotton …
my father was away, and it’s a big ranch.
Go in at night for the confusion.

The Big Kid’s problem was gettin’ to the inside man;
and he had to have cash and machines, drivers, trailers.
So the Kid found Cidro Ochoa,
a local contract picker and bar owner.
Cidro’s cash paid off the inside man,
Gene — the Cheney comptroller.

Running Cidro’s machines,
they started picking on a Friday evening,
picking late in the breeze
and again all of Saturday night — with no dew.
They left Sunday morning.

That afternoon, my father
followed cotton-trailer tracks down dirt roads,
which was easy since their aircraft tires left distinctive marks.
In the evening, he got to a windy gin yard —
a single cotton bale left behind in the gin moats and trash …
grown and stolen from the Cheney Ranch.

Hackman, the ginner, never split the sale money
and left the country, which enraged Cidro —
who proceeded to beat Ostraller’s Big Kid blind.
Old man Ostraller paid the medical bill before he threw his kid away.

My father fired Gene on Monday.
Our lenders almost owned the Cheney.

The following year the entire ranch was planted to cotton.
World markets crashed as constant south winds changed the pattern.
The Cheney got unloaded at a fire sale that wet winter,
to a Pittsburgh man who died three months later.

Gene cuts hair in a barbershop in rainy Susanville now.
Cidro Ochoa almost burned to death
in his underwear in a topless bar in Fresno.

They say I came along after Dad took Mom to the hospital —
born on a May dawn with snow in the desert,
as our cotton died and everyone worked like hell replanting:
it’s a wonder they didn’t name me Jonah.
I became the boy searching tool-yards
of faded junk cut by Woodrow’s torches —
farming shapes and farming names that Woodrow reformed
with acetylene and oxygen into simple wheel weights or float drags.
Years passed before we survived on better land.

Below me, the wind misused sprinkler water.
A broken mainline valve spewed fifty feet in the air —
the wind took it a ways, and the Cheney’s odd every day.
The spume’s a rainbow.

Away from the rise, back downhill into storm time,
as the sun crept behind the mountains,
the wind-borne sound of motors and sprinklers
caused me to remember sprinkler nozzles —
with big-ass orifices allowing the sand and salt through.
Drops as big as windshield bugs,
which shook the cotton on impact — I could see that.

I sat listening to chattering Rain Birds
while the south wind whipped that spray.

Nearing the end under clouds stacked above the evening,
I turned toward that shack leaning shaken by the south wind;
stored junk inside kept the walls from falling in.

I withdrew a salt-encrusted Rain Bird — a fine gray one —
and rode a half mile up to the metal pump station.
It’s badly holed; pocked metal sheets rattle,
reflecting the Cheney at dusk.

The oil companies’ stationary ship engines were sold,
leaving a ruin of pitted cement and ribbed walls
beneath the metal pound. What’s left
is a cracked north-south lonely chapel on the west rise.

We should be grateful, gone from the Cheney trap —
where the surrounds are other remains and Dave Cheney’s legs.
The legs … the legs are around somewhere.

I tossed the Rain Bird onto a rusted pile,
while the wind made noise and rain poured.
Wild Cheney’s legs had gotten away.
I slept wet that night in the pump station,
and the storm cleared late the following morning.

Going south along the canal away from Cheney’s trap,
I spent the afternoon in Devil’s Den drinking beer …

Feeling estranged from my source,
I paid for my beer and left the dry end of history,
written as sunburned dumb with empty gins
or faded tractors without wheels.

Outside of Devil’s Den, the asphalt climbed
past the prison where Luthor Rollins used to teach;
and forklifts stood up new walls,
using the tilt-up construction technique.
Beyond the prison were hills with fenced grass
and grazing cattle, surrounding a tangled windmill frame.
I turned at the narrow gravel, thinking there are several Devil’s Dens:
There’s one at Gettysburg. This one had Noah’s house trailer
and a large muddy engine under a pole barn —
with the prison down below.

My first Water Buffalo came in a trade for a similar rain machine;
Noah must have gotten another out of the creek.
I parked the bike, and a few steers stumbled off
while I checked over Noah’s work in progress: he’s a metal sculptor.
His sculpture looked like a shattered engine, with a holed
block and weeds grown from the hole —
disinterred and still wrapped in retrieval chains.
Chain-scarred iron with a stench —
the entire thing smelled of pesticide.

I left Noah’s accidental sculpture for his wide-open door —
he was long gone and dust covered everything inside.
An old grimy desk was set against a shattered window;
one piece of wadded paper was still on the sill.
Without knowing why, I reached and unwadded it.
The opener read:
Robbin’ the Mars Drive-In …

Must have been one of Luthor’s.

I folded it into my pocket before sitting at the desk
and staying up late in an imagined journey.

Eventually, the big engine outside
reminded me of diggin’ out the rain machine.

I unfolded Luthor’s poem and started writing on the back
about the day Noah and I drove an old flatbed truck
away from the morning sun:

The desert was softer beige along the wash.
Water shed east, then to the north through the alluvial fan.
Fractions of rough tamaracks lined the banks;
old rusting cars were thrown in the gaps for erosion control.
Better land came from the creeks:
some pieces grew onions and garlic;
the rest were a nation of unfarmed squares.
Tractors showed distress and age.
Irrigators changed water on the quarter-mile line.
Westside sounds were strange and misunderstood for miles.
It was a muddy afternoon down in the wash.

I saw a camp kettle on the gas stove;
the sun went down while I lit the burner and thought it through.
After a while, the banged-up kettle began to boil;
I found some coffee crystals in the darkening trailer and did the pour.
Outside, it seemed chilly in the grass —
coffee warmed my hands; prison lights lit the town.
Noah’s accidental sculpture …

Inside, I sat at the desk again.
There was a candle in a drawer.
I lit it from the stove and continued writing:

A place on the edge of itself in a valley of the same name.

After crossing that out,
I kept writing. It was cold and dark at the finish.
I relit the candle and a cigarette,
and read aloud what I had written:

Engines were used to move water.

Not too bad. I tried it again …

Diesel driven pumps were mounted on sleds
and used to boost water from deep wells to distant fields.
They were ugly — jerry-rigged by people named Irvin or Woodrow.
Over seasons, heavy sled-mounted pumps
acquired a clothing of grime — a sheathing of smoke-oily mud —
housed between ditches in mud slums.

My Dad called them “rain machines.”

Cidro Ochoa farmed section 35 across from our place,
growing summer cotton and winter barley grain.
His aging stationary engine was lathed and assembled in Moline.
Most of its working life was spent around Cantua,
mired in years of distressed lifting — rings and bearings almost
memories — unable to restart, living a lifetime pumping sentence:
It had no sense of self, knowing only internal explosive strife;
bound to move water, and the end was coming.
With no future after that — not even reformation
into a ship or something.

With Cidro watching through June, July, and into August,
the machine staggered, drinking oil to stay alive.
It died in an agony of expansive hot metal on August eleventh.
A thrown rod shattered the crank and block.
But the dawn-side deep well kept pumping, bursting the iron flanges —
making a cooling wash for the death boil of the Rain Machine.

Enraged, Cidro rolled it end over end.
Bulldozing, screaming, he shoved it over the bank —
joining old cars serving as erosion barriers in flood times …
eventually covered in a silt and mud grave … forgotten.

Holding the bank a generation,
the iron scarred and valleyed from rust.
The Rain Machine resurfaced after the creek changed its course.
Downstream litigation cambered the channel,
exposing the pitted iron to light on our Cantua Ranch.

Noah and I retrieved the scarred old junk
and hauled it to his pole barn.
It sat a little while before the sculptor was ready.
He restored and painted half of the engine block sun yellow,
and welded Murphy switches and Go-Devil blades to the flywheel.
Inserting shanks in the holed block,
a flat bar was added, clamped tightly as mast and crossbar —
all remounted on a drag sled and named “Moving Water.”

Noah sold it to an art dealer on the coast.
It fountains quietly in front of a bank in Mill Valley now.

In his later years, irrigators said Cidro Ochoa
reformed old tools for pleasure, though they seldom worked well.
Abusing the grinders and vises,
he died beating disc spools with a sledge —
just prior to Noah’s resurrection of the Rain Machine.

Cidro was a cheater pipe of a man …

When I returned from the Westside,
Luthor had a few gaps in his sheet metal.
And it wasn’t till Tuesday morning that he told me why,
saying Noah rode a yellow motorcycle over to the south coast,
where his best old girlfriend, Raye, had hepatitis —
on the muddy side of Morro Bay by Montaña de Oro.

But the metal sculptor froze on the final hour over to the coast.
Shaking from coastal fog,
he saw a canoe and stole some firewood.

Pushed a canoe into high tide
and paddled over the shallows to the mud flats —
wearing a motorcycle helmet all the way.
Don’t smoke … paddle … darkness … stroke.
Crossing the shallows to the sandspit.

I imagined moving through the fog
without seeing anything while hearing breakers on the other side.

Her spit was out there somewhere.

Ocean’s a foot deep, scatters of fog, and a single canoe.
Hundred and forty pounds of Noah landin’ on the sandpile.
No boat … so she must have crossed the mud at low tide.

Climbing the pile as fog cleared under a moon,
Noah looked down on a small fire and Raye …
and slid down the dune to a skirt laid open on the sand.
A wasted, naked woman in a wine stupor,
warmed by her own stolen firewood.

She was camped nowhere, dying across his legs.
He had to love her … it made sense, he had to:
It felt pretty damn bad, but she’d asked him to —
and offered everything she owned if he burned her body.

Then Raye leaned into all the right places.
And Noah ran out of ideas till she died.
Then he just held her … and the wood and fire were his.

Luthor said it was the following night
before Noah burned a driftwood pyre to ashes —
then scattered her over the sandspit as fog walls
rolled in … he found the cash before navigating back.
Losing his paddle halfway; the canoe left stranded on the flats.

Now a year or more had weathered Raye into the winter sea
leading to a bitter cold evening on my way out of Fresno …

“I need some change.
Nah, I’m not farming anymore. Lookin’ for a guy named Noah.”

When you’re early, you hide behind garbage cans —
and the stench doesn’t capture the feeling of the city.
Your mind is dried up, and you count everyone’s steps.
But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.

A cop presides over the cars and sounds
and windblown voices.
The barkeep don’t notice you’re filthy —
a morning beer, and you don’t either;
’cause you really haven’t slept in days,
watching the buildings rise and fall.

But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad …
but it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.

It’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad …
but it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad …
but it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad …
yeah, it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.

“Thanks a lot, man” …

In the early spring, Luthor’s concern for Noah
kept me searching across many cold, saucer valleys —
coffee rimmed by low hills, and your eye carries across them.

I came to a water tower and hardware store
next to an iron-wall bar, where the bartender sold me beer —
telling me a lot of things about an old Packard.
She didn’t smile as she did.

A tall, skinny man — too nice, wide smile —
and he never said his name.
He’d come in once in a while, driving up in that old Packard.
They didn’t like him. All his stuff was weather beige
with a stove piped outta the roof.
Friendly, quiet, clean — they didn’t like his clothes
or care for him, because he wasn’t like them.

I remember the bartender’s name —
Lindy … Lindy Crawslad.

Searching through the dry cold
for a restless man in the straight-motor Packard.
The cattle shivered because they had to stand for it.

A month later, I went into the iron-wall bar again.
Lindy didn’t say as much … fewer cows.

Hasn’t been around, knows somebody wants him:
they told him about my odd motorcycle
and sent me up the Colorado.

I kept working north through the freezing spring.
One night inside a roadhouse,
I heard a travel song from a jar band.
They sang about one of those ruin places
on the north end of a dry plateau with a cold night wind,
where a musician’s van lost its water pump,
releasing the fan into the radiator.

The singer seemed to recognize me at the break
and came through the small crowd,
introducing himself as Mike:
a goatee guy, offering to buy me a beer.
I nodded at Mike —
and felt something involving Noah coming on.

He said they’d been doin’ gigs
in the high desert below the rock country —
playin’ badlands for a month or so.

After their fourth or fifth gig, they left one night
drivin’ an old van — Mickey’s Econoline — under a ringed moon.
Mickey’s cranked, everybody’s tired,
and they got two hundred miles to go;
so they’re in the hum, drivin’ alone at three …
maybe four … in the morning.

When Mike got startled by a steel scream — a rattle pound — they’re
in trouble: those high speeds, they grind up and go.
Then the death knell of their water pump
sent the fan ripping into the radiator. Everybody shakes,
and they’re traveling musicians in the breakdown lane.

I said, “That’s pretty good, Mike.”

But it got cold in Mickey’s van; they sat there a while,
in that metal box, before they start pullin’
blankets — thinkin’ burn everything they got.

Was Mickey all right? Well, Mickey’s pissed, but what the hell.

Then after a bitter hour, out of the east came quivering yellow lights —
glowing almost like a heat on an old weather-beige Packard:
the one with the block-long motor, a stove piped out of the top.

I wasn’t surprised, so Mike paused … sipped his beer,
swallowed, and said, “Mickey wanted me to tell you this.”

Well, the car stops, and the window went down.
A thin, shaking grin asked if there was motion.
He called himself Noah, and offered to haul ‘em into town.

Noah pulled ‘em into town with a ship rope —
the band in the van, Mike ridin’ with him,
with Noah listening to the radio.
He asked Mike his name, so Mike said “Mike.“

Then Noah told him he was the kind didn’t want to be found:
a Roy was lookin’ for him, sent by a Luthor.
“He’ll hit the bars, Mike, to find the music.
You’ll like the beard, the winter suit, and bike.
You tell him, ‘Let it go, I’m alive, doin’ good,’ like tonight —
here’s the shop, Mike.”

Mike offered to pay anything; Noah shook his head, “No no.”
He offered again, but all Noah wanted was some Crusty Flakes.

So Mike stumbled across the street into the all-night.
Hollered, “Gimme some Crusty Flakes.”

Nervous clerk didn’t have any idea what they were —
kinda like a Zoom cereal, but they had none.

So he grabbed another clerk, and he pointed out
a case a flakes out back.

So they bought forty-eight boxes
of those Crusty Flakes with gig cash.
Mickey and the band broke down the forty-eight
and crammed ’em into the Packard.

Mike stopped, put his hands flat on the bar.

Noah, silent … gets in … drives off … stops … backs up …
window down … looks out,
“You tell Roy not to follow me — he’s not good at it.”

Mike looked a searching chord at me.
I shrugged it off and thanked him.

I left the roadhouse; and it was black-cold outside,
with shivering handlebars along the muddy river ice.

Even icier the following morning,
so I left my Buffalo on a cattle ranch.
An aging cowman gave me a ride on his way to auction …
because the winter froze half his herd — cattle might go
for sixty-five cents a pound.
He needed sleep, so I drove him across the plateau.

Then I kept going into the auction town, leaving him there
with his window cracked and the motor running.

On the far edge of town past a slaughterhouse,
the hood was up on a wheelless Packard
mounted on some jack stands between a gas station and diner.

Noah was inside the diner eating chili.
His mouth ends dropped as I sat down and ordered some too.
He looked away, and we waited in silence
till my own cracked bowl came.

After two spoons of chili:
Noah had heard I was wandering for him.
I didn’t say anything, and we continued
with our chili in a callous diner.
Three spoons: as it darkened outside the yellow rivet booth,
the drone of big-truck hauling drifted through the window,
while our images were reflected in the glass
with a page-turner music box in between.

So it became indirect-image eye contact,
with our mouths full of chili,
as I watched him talk to the window.

Noah was over his head —
exhausted from burning Raye’s body on the sandspit … didn’t know
why he wrote Victorville, maybe for confusion,
it didn’t go anywhere.

Then Noah’s crackers spilled, while he whispered about ashes.
I smashed my own crackers into the chili, and sodas to mash.
Maybe Noah was grieving, or just giving stuff away — but his eyes
went down to my bowl, and I had maybe half a bowl left.

It took two days to burn Raye, and he wanted
to give the money to her family in L.A.
Riding in rain all the way up the coast,
he got to Pasadena soaking wet.

But they didn’t want any part of Raye — just shut their door hard …

So he spent a couple of hours riding in the storm near 6th and Main.
Tired, he parked at the gas station and walked
up and down the Wilshire before he got under a roof
by a block wall in a paved schoolyard.

A school called Saint Anne’s;
and there was a wet sense of two a.m.
when he woke to the slick sound of a federal Ford creeping in.

Rain kept pouring, while the car paused on the asphalt.
It seemed unaware of him,
with its lights beaming on the main entrance.
He had Raye’s cash and felt exposed
when the halogens came on.

And another sort of used car arrived from the main side.
Both cars faced each other —
headlights switched off in the downpour.
A quick fellow stepped out of the first car
to set down a Pepsi can
where poles go in the center of a game circle.
Then the man retreated into the federal Ford
like he expected something —
maybe police rotor roar.

Instead, the opposing passenger door opened
too fast, slammed back, reopened — no dome light —
and a single lean guy got out … stumbled
in the storm, and gathered the Pepsi can in.

Holding it between his index and thumb,
he scattered glances at the gaps in the walls
and through a cyclone fence.
Then a startled one at him.

As he briefly stood on the reflected lines of the game circle,
a few seconds passed in the rain before he returned to his car.

Both cars started and left the way they came in.
Then backing out the incline, Federal’s cone of light rose,
flashing stained windows — so the ceremony was over.

The can was just a goddamned middle-of-the-night drug deal.
Half hour later, the clouds cleared; and walking back,
a round-faced man slumped on a bench.

Noah had the cash already wrapped in two packages —
wrote nonsense on the outside of one,
and the rest stayed in his pants.
Then the bus came. The coat was Raye’s, too.

Noah waved our waitress away,
asking me the man’s name on the bench.

“Clifford Leamas. Linda’s his sister in Moab;
the grandmother’s Eileen.”

Noah hesitated before saying he hoped he found his shoes.

On my eleventh chili spoon:
I asked Noah along, but he needed more time …
and just handed me a package —
telling me and Luthor to leave him alone.

After a dozen spoons with Noah Ingram:
I took the rest of Raye’s money on the rough Greyhound
rough because its tires were chained …

By late spring, the Rio Grande
was a dry, narrow stream. Carrot processors
had me pulling irrigation lines in front of a digger.

Adding their money to Raye’s, I went northwest to Amarillo;
slept on a roadside and made
four hundred miles the next day —
across a small piece of Utah and a lot of Nevada.

The Sierra came over the horizon by evening.
There were forty million people on the other side.

I hadn’t seen my attorney
since just before my mother’s funeral,
so I headed southwest toward John’s refuge:
an empty resort hotel, in an endless escrow,
situated on a long-term Indian lease — 184 empty rooms,
TVs gone, rats at the mattresses,
and raccoons alive in its convention center —
an ugly white house with customers’ histories
scattered in the lobby on reservation forms.

John had me reading the watershed years,
1959 to ’64 in the Presidential Suite:
books stacked on an unlevel floor
with a Yamaha grand piano on the mound;
books dried on the high ground after a southern storm.
Altogether, it was air-conditioned shelter.
A potential buyer thought it either the worst hotel
or best campground he’d seen so far,
but the escrow had gone on for years.

Most rooms had courtyard views
of graveled roofs or the simple golf course
backing into a canyon and windshield mountains.
Its windless condition meant exploring my high, short game
and John’s putting out on the burning-hot course.
“Crazy Mama” helped the stroke
as John asked about the money in his safe.
He said it made him nervous, so I told him
there’s nothing illegal there, just some of Noah’s cash.
Then he made a really nice shot.

Every year my lawyer looked more like Ben Franklin
as his gift for friendship increased
and led to tickets everywhere:
A big man in the shoulders, neck, and head,
John drove the golf cart and putted like an architect.
But his heart was disciplined from caring
for an older, disabled brother.
Just in case, I scribbled a note,
This cash went from Raye to Noah, and he gave it to me.

That night’s power outage smelled kind of like
a rat in the wiring, so we went out for the power
in a grill. John ordered a pair of steaks
and asked me if I was writing any farm pieces.

“Just one about who’s got seed bags, who doesn’t.”

A month later I left the cash in his safe
and headed for the South and maybe Austin again.
All the warmth ran away from desert summer nights.
Most times I pulled off to ground sleep in the blue plaid bag —
my head kept warm inside an aviator’s leather helmet.
Waking to bright, chill mornings,
with sunny, hot days peaking in tall arcs.
Then evening closed — asleep
near Piacacho, Deming, and Van Horn.

Once more through the Davis Mountains near Ozona.
What did I know of the Texas Hill Country?
I located a pair of paper bags and wrote this in the grit wind:

First bag complained to the second,
“I’m so lonesome in Fredericksburg —
they got no Hank Williams, just the Air Cav
and their girlfriends dancin’ to oompah-pah;
most of ’em drinkin’ beer or swallowin’
potato salad at an outdoor picnic.”

The second bag confessed,
“Who really gives a damn
if we’re lonesome in Fredericksburg, Texas?
If my name was Whayn, I’d rotor away
to Memphis women in Tennessee.”

I trashed those bags, since
there wasn’t any fluid in the words,
and continued into Fredericksburg
on the western end of the Texas Hill Country.
I fried the Buffalo’s wiring there,
working around the rest of the summer washing dishes
or throwing heavy landscaping sod in September.

October was turning bulls into steers.
November, meant vineyard staking
for a Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Harry Sabieknas.
And while my Buffalo was rewired, I ate Thursday meals
at Böheims, where my friend Uwe was the chef
and his food was Bavarian. A nervous Hungarian
posing as a Czech owned the place —
Otto must have been a retired spy in a witness program.

Most of my bike-repair cash
came from washing the dishes.
Nights were spent reading Daniel Boorstin
on creativity, in Sabieknas’s vacant farmhouse.
Rent meant feeding eight cats, three cows,
and maybe a horse. Sabieknas used an Airstream trailer
on a hill. I slept in the freezing house on the flat —
cat litter inside per instructions. My room had Harry’s cot
with the plaid bag and travel clothes.
Vineyard days … and icy nights asleep in the moon suit —
waking from mobile dreams under a bare lightbulb.

I left before Christmas after staking the vineyard;
going west on the 290 with the latest dream on my mind,
that spoke in the voice of a blackboard scolding a windmill:

“Just below the Flat Rock Forest,
what kind of windmills they got? And how far
are they from the 98th meridian?”

The windmill bet they were turbines,
several degrees east of the 98th meridian —
as I left the silver oaks of a hill country,
climbing from 290 onto the 10.

After the turn, going further west into a dry land
without any windmills, the 290 fell behind;
and the grade sliced through limestone eras,
with scrub oaks advancing on the hills.
Yet going west on the 10,
I still wondered about that blackboard land.

Written on or about, the line
can be a border, a scrawl, or just a line.
It wasn’t a color or a kind, but a condition —
flat, clean, and simple … not easy.
They got no windmills on my Westside;
its conditions left water deep beneath the ground.
It started me thinking at sundown in the Davis Mountains …
thought most of the way through.

After hours, I could see the road scrawl;
my headlight cone was the finder.
Air passage came back at a moderate speed —
the right side wind, and the motorcycle leaned against it.
I rode crooked … headlight … air pass …
moderate side wind … lean … crooked … deep in thought.

Several years before, I’d abandoned my past
and lived on the streets for a time —
bought motorcycles, remembering not to forget them.
I thought of my children for ten miles or so
till I turned into the Ozona truck stop.

Inside the diner, names on some truck doors
and reefer vans got me writing down farming
places — Three Rocks, Five Points, and Four Corners —
then stolen trucks and river scramble.
A poem called “Those Trees” took most of an hour.

Afterwards, I went west on a reconstructed orange road —
where the color orange controlled the weeds.
Afraid of road scramble,
I turned off the freeway for southern hours.

For the next two months my home was a metal trailer,
belonging to a Texas separatist,
who was also a grain hauler.
So I hauled grain for a split-axle man named Avenal —
a large mixture of a Baptist
enjoying machine guns below Alpine.
It’s all those bearded guys do
while misreading the Constitution.

The last night over too many Lone Stars,
Avenal reacted poorly after hearing that “We the People”
was lifted from an Iroquois treaty.

So I left him by the fire and rode north a few hours.
Back on the 10, weather changed to blowing sand
and Russian thistle across the freeway.
The motorcycle steered badly, and my hand hit
the kill switch accidentally in the dark.

A couple of chilly hours
with no power in the median’s weeds —
before turning the switch on in the middle of nowhere.
“C’mon, Roy,” got me through the chill and blowing sand —
until a wax-haired waitress sold me chicken-fried steak
in the next town, … spilling gravy
on a letter to my children there.
I mailed it to them anyway, and felt too tired to go on —
falling asleep till the waitress woke me at midnight.

Outside, it was bitter sand beaten into dust storm,
blowing the motorcycle sideways —
bitter sand and damn wild all the way into Van Horn.
Headwinds into the upper end of the Rio Grande,
past cotton sections, scarred overgrown ditches,
and buried mainlines — as jackrabbits ran
shifty slants through the tools and rusty cans of west Texas.

Two more hours into better farming above El Paso.
In the predawn, Juárez’s lights
and smoke were across the river.
El Paso was the usual nightmare at sunrise.
A few farmers were preirrigating cotton in Las Cruces —
there seemed to be more pecans than I recalled,
large lines of naked sleepy trees.

The sun rose on the climb away from the river valley.
Lordsburg’s for fuel … brakeline air was bled in Bowie …
enchiladas were eaten before Tucson.
I left sundown behind in the red and beige desert.
The Salt River Valley was ahead,
and I was tired after eight hundred miles.
The Buffalo steered hard; bearings tightened;
brakes weakened; moving conservatively … low on money.
On my way to see my attorney,
a day away from the Spirit Room —
which I’d never really heard of, because it lay in the future,
north in the mountains and past my attorney’s path.

The passing headlights moved on toward Phoenix
as my rotor kept expanding, contacting the disc.
Needing to bleed my lines again,
I pulled into a stop and bled them in a harsh place —
not soothing, more like a new prison than a park.
Toward the washroom were notices
on ashtrays, … loitering, … and vague maps.
A scrawled plea was taped on the door of the men’s,
saying, We’re in the bushes and need money.

After washing, I came out — writers had written
words over the plea: blue requests for sex, or
just total yellow nonsense. They obviously viewed
themselves as righteous. I turned away from the plea.
A curly-haired man waited beside the motorcycle —
sunburned, blistered, and frightened —
took a breath, pleaded for time …
because they were stranded somehow.
His name was Donnie, on the way to L.A.
Their car had blown up in El Paso.
Hanging around all day, people had given them food,
not money. He’d worked building house trailers in Tennessee;
now they’re going to L.A. for the earthquake work.
His wife appeared off to the side.
She was scared, too, and looked
ill and pale in the sunlight —
with wide-set eyes in a bleak, frypan face;
maybe seven months pregnant.
The motor was ruined on a late-seventies
Chevrolet — the worst kind — and
their car doors were already in Juárez.
The L.A floor’s no place for a baby.
I had ninety dollars: they took forty and a can of sardines …
a tired, pregnant, hill woman
and a sunburned man in the desert.

Back on the 10, my steering got harder,
my brakes wondered what the hell was going on —
when I spent some of the fifty dollars for gasoline in Phoenix,
paying a surly man behind bulletproof glass.
Afterwards I passed a cemetery
where one of my brothers was buried.

But I rode north on the 17,
leaving Phoenix behind. And my fork seals
almost disappeared pulling into the Yellow River Bar.
Inside, the Yellow River ran meatloaf
with mashed potatoes and beer. I played Sun records
from Tennessee like a horse’s ass and slept out back.
Drunk under the stars in the blue plastic tarp.

The next afternoon, going further north in the mountains,
a sign for an artist colony called Jerome came along.
I turned uphill, and the road zigzagged to the old copper town.

Thirsty, I stopped in a silver shop to ask, where’s a bar?
The shop woman was pretty, with olive green eyes.
She called herself Angela Silvermetal
and sent me to the Spirit Room for sundown —
leading me to believe she wanted a beer with sunset.
It wasn’t too far, and I ordered two dark beers inside,
then sat waiting under an old ceiling
with west-facing windows.

A valley twenty miles or so across
was backed by three-tiered mountains.
Winter day had a half hour to go with ranging shadows,
as the sun lowered and I waited for Angela Silvermetal.
But all I got was the final reflection off the Mogollon Plateau.
The valley gray-white melded into rise —
becoming reds, and oranges, and a nightgown purple.
Over all was the sun — then most of the sun
and a line of white yellow
above the line of mountains
opposed to copper Jerome.
Both beers gone with the extreme colors …
a fading … then none of the sun.

I paid for sunset and put the Spirit Room in the past.

My fifty dollars had eleven left;
most of the rest was spent in Havasu for fuel.

The journey closed over breakfast with my attorney.
He liked the sound of Angela Silvermetal.

I didn’t tell him about the nightgown purple.
The tip was paid with my last dollar and forty-seven cents …

The pain was everything — and I didn’t know
what day it was or how far to the next town:
because my lower left molar ached to the bone …
at three in the morning, three-thirty, four, eight o’clock.

Finally turning into a truck stop,
I ripped their phone book to the dental A’s — nobody in.
Then relief at the V’s in Dr. Valenzuela.

Valenzuela tried running the keeper words: root canal.
I said, “Rip it out,” and put the tooth in a blue box.

Back on the bike …
the pain kept going into sundown,
and there wasn’t any magic in the handlebars —
just a rhythm at fifty miles an hour
hour after hour, till sunrise …

A big gray house in the sycamores —
late night thoughts and who they’re for.
Children of mine, children of theirs,
the crops I lost — my Buffalo thoughts …

A river of cars through broken fields.
Cold, tired, and climbing hills.
Memories are the stay behinds
connecting life form and time.
Late night Buffalo thoughts …

Twisted rim in the sand,
fix that tire again.
In the sand,
fix that tire again.

A jumbled pile called a town,
Las Cruces is falling down.
Down to the old sea bed,
loud metal bird is bleeding red.

Children of mine, children of theirs,
the crops I lost — my Buffalo thoughts …

Twisted rim in the sand,
fix that tire again.
In the sand,
fix that tire again.

I spent another hour wasting time.

Sunrise, sunrise, sunrise …

I spent a month at my attorney’s hotel,
and rode through the Westside in June.
My family’s farming position had weakened,
as world cotton cheapened. And my father grieved —
struggling with another Cheney trap.

A month later during a storm,
he called my children on the telephone.
They spoke during a night of summer rain:
of not knowing where I was and what to do if I showed …
what could I want or need? … and, yes,
my children were fine.

I was in a Fresno bar two miles south of my father,
restlessly thinking of crops lost
because of summer rains. My job
was to sell them over the telephone.
But that night they rotted in the same storm.
I kept ashing into rough ashtrays in a steamy bar jangle —
my hand on the empty glass, looking at the dregs.

After turning on the stool to go outside,
there was a lonely hardwood in the rain —
a crepe tree grown slow from mint in its bed.
Touching wet wood, I noticed glistening asphalt
and its weather cracks.

A downward glance at sandaled bare feet
beside me … then another glance
up at the strange face of a deeply gorgeous woman.
We left in the rain … I’ll say it again,
we left. Walking around, talking till four about rockets,
our fathers; and the rain-pour noise made us talk real loud.

Jan said her house had wine,
so we drank it all in her wet backyard,
while her washing machine filled from the garden hose.

In the morning we wore clean clothes,
riding past the average blackeyes.
I told Jan they were beans,
on our way into the mountains.
After breakfast in the early mill country,
there were scattered showers
along the Sierra base during our slow climb.

It was the Buffalo’s final ride
to where a pair of creeks joined,
where their division stopped.
Then the rains passed, and Jan showed me
her sycamores overhanging swollen streams.

Over the next month, I was unemployed after the storm,
slept through many dawns in her backyard,
till we said good-bye under the sycamores.

The next day, cracks in the Buffalo’s radiator
meant Luthor and I went downtown
and got Noah’s yellow trail bike.

I headed to Eugene, and we never spoke face-to-face again.

The small motorcycle went through the mill country
without passing anyone —
because its fifteen horsepower only made
thirty-five miles an hour … hour after hour …
climbing hills in low … and down them in the second gear.
Nights inside the blue tarp.
Mornings started on the roadsides
from what engineers called the “borrow pits.”
Sunlight never cleared pines by breakfast time;
and no one cared if the sun ever cleared those trees.

Oregon was constant shade.
Eugene had heroin sold from the corners.
And after a while I rode up into the Willamette Valley,
where the mint was gathered in a night harvest —
I stayed until the mint was in.

Then the rains drove me south through those Cascades
for Juárez — but it was too long a ways on a trail bike;
and the clutch shattered twenty miles above Fresno,
going downhill at the oak tree line.
It took a few days to hitchhike down to the desert,
where I spent a week spreading drywall mud
for Wiley Post’s grandson — which paid for Lindbergh’s
Autobiography of Values and a bus ticket to Juárez.

Slipping into illness in Juárez,
I used Yolanda from Las Cruces to get well —
and made friends with her father,
siphoning water into pecans at night.
Angel was the man who forgave me his daughter.
A few days later, I bought a green bike
and moved to my tent for a couple of months of irrigating.

Reading most afternoons; changing pecan water at dusk,
and again at dawn.
Then my imagination returned
through the breakdown on worn motorcycles.
Images were banked as storms of small objects
in a landscape of no age.
And the Westside unfolded in outlines.
When I called on Luthor for his views,
Noah answered the telephone
and told me Luthor was in coma.

That evening, I helped Angel finish changing the water —
he reminded me of the roofing men,
shouldering bundles of siphon hoses into the groves.

Later there was almost a sense of closure out on the 10 —
the green bike went faster than the Buffaloes.
My headlight just drilled into a cold New Mexican night,
while my thoughts went toward Fresno:
and what I’d heard was Luthor’s flat brain.
Another hour of rising and falling land
made me question the flatness.
Rough construction over a bridge
reminded of my mother’s death.
I increased my speed till a Freightliner
pulling a dry load of something passed.
Windblown, I reconnected to Luthor’s
leaving … not waiting for me, but for something.
Another half hour passed with a half-moon
rising into black sky.

Fueling in Lordsburg, I paid and kept on traveling;
Lordsburg cost five dollars for gasoline.
Back on the 10, lights and occasional traffic …
I wondered, where would Luthor go, and what would he read?
The next few miles edged near the mountains.
Noah had told me old girlfriends were checking charts
and shouting Luthor’s own material at him.
Slowing down,
I parked the green bike along the edge.
Walking along a New Mexican road,
an Airstream pulled by someone almost hit me —
a surprising wind could have left me a broken man.

But the travel home passed;
so I got out my cigarettes to roll a Drum …
done with shaking hands in the borrow pit …
rolling and blowing smoke. More taillights went away
and their sounds did too.
Surrounded by large darkness
except for my cigarette under the night —

I looked up at the stars and thought of shouting girlfriends.
My hands stopped shaking as I kept remembering
our earlier dialogues. Luthor had taught his convicts
to organize their words around proposal poems.
But an empty coma must be a busy thing:

“No, man they’ve left me alone and I’m just lying here.”

I looked around as a car slowed …
like it wanted Luthor to continue.
And after waving it by and watching its taillights disappear,
What followed?
Just the echo of a hacking cough —
like he wanted me to let you know where you’re going.
So I asked him, how?

“Just goddamn tell them, Roy — start with Max Gonzales.”

“What if he’s imprisoned or dead?”

“Then dig him out.”

“What about you?”

“Go on to Gila Bend and your brother Russell.”

“So you’ll follow my brother?”

“Yes, Roy, that’s my proposal poem … ”

On the way west to bury an old friend,
I stopped in close to where the Gila bends,
to respect one of my brothers.

The Gillespie Ranch is ugly —
surrounded by rocky outcroppings of great beauty.
The old fortress house is still standing,
diminished and cleaner.
The tamaracks are thirty-seven years further along …
taller, wider, and shaped as driftwood,
with sparse gray green foliage topping them.

To the south, the canal —
the water course from the Gillespie Dam.
A young college student planted awkward flowers
while I poured coffee; he called me sir,
which amused me.

I wandered through the aged hangar,
crossed the runway, and climbed the canal bank;
looked down into the water,
to remember Russell’s place in the flow.

On a hot day, from the shade of younger tamaracks,
I could see Sarah stumbling from the canal,
calling for Hazel.

Russell was drowning,
trapped in the trash up against the siphon fall.

My parents carried him to Phoenix.
Russell died on the way at five years old.

I’ve watched my father during funerals for other children,
his face a mapped mountain fronted with death weather.

Russell laid in the Catholic cemetery
in Phoenix for thirty-three years.
He’s buried next to my mother now;
my father saw to that.

He leaves Gila Bend the hell alone.

In the timber-framed ranch house,
on the kitchen wall,
Russell used to dig holes in the adobe
with spoons — happy, laughing.
It’s probably mudded over now.
Existing pictures are touched and yellowed,
memories bright and unseen … unspoken.

Hazel explained leaving and loss to me,
on a visit to Arkansas.

Crops come and become:
Hazel’s gone now —
an old, black, rainfall woman,
who colored my feelings
of death times in the Gila desert.

My sister suffered for years over Russell.
Sarah has twin girls now.

Gila Bend meant Russell’s death,
Sarah’s rabies, and Amanda’s recognition
that I would grow and that she could not.

My father’s grief shaped him into a kind promontory,
standing and aiding in receding sands, till he is over.

Gila Bend in 1959:
the heat crack of sunset;
echoes of life and death sound;
sunrise, sundown.

Several times over the years,
I’ve come to see Russell’s place in the flow
— as a taller, wider piece of driftwood  myself —
surface slowly moving to other fields
while the water listens.

I returned to the motorcycle under the tamaracks.
The flowers were in.
I wished them a good stay
and rode to Fresno …

Luthor’s coma was four months old
by the time I parked in front of the Chicken Empire.
Unstrapping from my travel clothes —
Noah said I looked like a bearded Romanian peasant woman.

The coma remained unchanged
as I slept through the afternoon behind the café.

I awoke to Noah handin’ me a cup of coffee.
And after a little while, he told me he’d bought an old house.
I asked if there was a couch, and he said there was —
and that his backyard needed clearing out.
So we closed over runny eggs at the Chicken Empire.

The next day we sat in Noah’s overgrowth
for several hours before driving downtown
to Luthor’s coma.
Everyone had called it a tragicomedy,
from hospital to coma house and back again.

Still I was surprised when he
didn’t look like Luthor anymore:
toothless, the platinum eyeglasses gone;
his misshapen face, clean-shaven;
and his feet looked strong.
Dying in a room full of chanting dancers,
while surly nurses adjusted his straps.

He seemed ready to go,
but rancid old girlfriends wouldn’t let him.
After the chanting stopped and the nurses left,
I almost killed him there.
But Noah calmed me down,
reading elegies scrawled on breathing machines.

Then we said a good-bye of sorts —
kissed his eyes, and held his feet.

After the hospital, Noah dropped me at the Chicken Empire
where a young woman named Sara ran its four to close.

I’d met her briefly the year before.
Sara had flawless skin and eyes that made things,
so I bought a coffee to go.

But something came into our voices
as she maneuvered me outside by the entrance.
We went over the New Deal out there,
because she’d studied Roosevelt in acting school:
FDR was a slippery old bastard,
and the sidewalk was made by the WPA.

Late the next evening, leaning over the counter,
Sara wondered about women from my past.
I didn’t say, just asked if I could visit her home.
Sara started, stopped — clearly responding she’d like that.

She was almost twenty-one,
putting me at ease in her first house.
Both in over our heads, as Sara told me about herself,
her dreams of drama, and family stories.

The following night my bike was loaded for travel.
Sara wore gloves and was wrapped
in my walkable sleeping bag.

We rode out of town with reefer and whiskey,
and turned into a rocky vineyard,
and climbed uphill into Marilyn’s muscats —
city lights to the south,
rolling papers under the moon …
just smokin’ with our thoughts in the vineyard.

But we didn’t stay long.
It was a struggle getting the bike down the deeply pitted road,
before riding slowly over the dam, then through the river valley.

Back in town, we parked by an old churchyard,
drank the whiskey amongst the statues,
and became lovers that morning.

Looking back, Luthor’s closing season
was mostly wrapped around picks and shovels.
Our ebb and flow became yard days,
dusk visits to Luthor, most nights with Sara.

Noah had vast ambitions in the morning light
like you’ve got on desert farms.
And he loved the ramshackle old roof.
But we began with the wraparound yard
overwhelmed by hard sunflowers and horsetails.

We cut them down —
discovering four rusty appliances
and eleven frying pans in the tangled trash:
maybe chicken feeders.
Also found a rotting carpet used as weed control.

A round, plastic pool was behind the garage.
We put the carpet and the other trash in the cracked pool
and dragged it out behind the back alley vines.

I pulled unhealthy trees so the good ones would grow
and dug deep basins to water those trees …
then dug them deeper.

Noah turned to the garage —
boiling, mopping, and wood oiling.
Doors were repaired because of Noah’s insistence
about morning light — so we also doubled the window.

Pruning, leveling, bracing:
we built stays and supports
after transplanting the back alley vines.

Nocturnal friends with beer and whiskey
brought us stories
about one of Luthor’s journeys fueled by astrological charts
he’d done for waitresses on the way.
Blazing fires split the darkness on moonless nights,
coloring our yard receptive yellows.

But his lungs were going —
perhaps drowning with memories
of the women he’d loved
or the poetry he’d taught to convicts.

Then we ate over warm coals in the mornings
as dusty garden hoses watered the trees.

Our work went on except for the
shaggy spires by the garage …
every day deciding to leave those palm trees alone.

Instead, we kept enlarging berms
around the fire pit
and around the grapefruit tree too.

One evening, I turned the loam
into garden beds by lantern,
while Noah painted the east garage wall
a pastel orange.
Next we colored the north side aqua,
cleaning our rollers on the back side.
We thought the cleaning wall was the strongest.

Several nights I enjoyed Sara’s stories,
and she seemed amused by my gigantic tree basins…
laughing at my imagined canyons …
as Noah moved his easels into the cold garage.

Tables were warped doors;
supplies were kept in old trunks.
His first work was painting my motorcycle tractor green.

Then a quick study of the yard:
clean trees, massive beds,
and bare grayish browns without any grass.

We let it age a little more before
Noah used sand rakes to ridge the loam,
rippling shapes
around an old flask and junk.
Candles stretched out the shadows
and defined the effects.

The grapefruit tree was wise.
Basins were shadowed canyons.
And the made beds held mysteries.

When Sara came, she laughed, cried, and slept in my arms.

The following morning, we walked down to the Empire,
talkin’ dust on the garden hose.

I heard from somewhere behind me that Luthor Rollins
died — you know, that brain-dead writer guy — the
pneumonia took him.

But Noah had gotten a hold of Luthor’s teeth and glasses
before they buried him with a backhoe.

We tossed one of Luthor’s poems into the hole …
the one about the three poets in his class
who robbed the Mars Drive-In.

His memorial was in the afternoon,
so we went to see my mother’s grave.
Egg-hungry after that, we ate at the Empire —
Luthor put the place on the map with his chicken poems.

There wasn’t much religion at the service,
just seven hundred people
and a lot of Luthor in front of an altar.

Huge pictures, astride motorcycles:
one naked by a canyon;
another as a child in the woods;
a third, with the false teeth exposed.
A barrage of stories honoring a big, booming guy.

Luther Rollins was a poet in this town …

Whoa oh, ahhhhh … whoa oh, ah-hah …
whoa oh, ah-hah … whoa oh, ahhhh.

Crisscross wires in the glass.
Everyone passed the class.

Hard wire fences.
Relax … backhoes …
raised on the hard clay … raised on the hard clay.
Stray fabric on the door … stray fabric on the door.

Plea take that cash … plea take that cash …
plea take that cash — runway coyote cash.

Got his verb wrong. Got his verb wrong.
Punctuate it, somehow … punctuate it somehow.

Yes sir, ah-hah …
yes sir, ah-hahhmm.

Whoa oh, ah-hah … whoa oh, ah-hah …

After Luthor died I didn’t feel like writing …
so I just kept going up the coast
till I passed Moe Inch’s Inn,with pasture on three sides
and ocean down below. I recalled Luthor, the Fresno poet,
mentioning a windmill by a leaning tree above Moe’s
I slept by the windmill into the following afternoon,
then rode the motorcycle down to the white building.

I parked in front and walked
into a long narrow room with a scarred oak bar.
Some time passed with nachos and beer,
until an older white-haired man wandered in.
I wasn’t surprised when the bartender called him Oscar.
Luthor had mentioned him—a retired man in the redwoods;
a more muscular Einstein,
a rocket-fuel specialist from Huntsville, Alabama,
who became a physicist
at Ernest Lawrence’s lab in Livermore.

Oscar sat a stool away and ordered a beer
After it came, I introduced myself and told him
Luthor had fallen from a ladder and died in a coma.
Oscar murmured that was too damned bad.
He’d known the poet in the coastal woods ten years before.

Sometimes you get along because you both know someone.
After swapping a few more stories, Oscar asked,
“Where you been sleepin’?”
I answered, “By the windmill with half its vanes.”

Ordering us both another beer, Oscar queried, “Why?”
“Well, I’ve put the writing down for a while.”

Afternoon shadows lengthened as Oscar spoke
in the southern tones of a sixty-year-old man
in overalls from where those white sheets got damn mean.
Then we shifted into farming and motorcycles.
Our connection became the land,
and we ordered a round for tractors
and motorcycles in the same patterns,
then drank another for the postwar farm changes.
We had a few more for his strange rockets:
Oscar explained the twisting forces
and effort of controlled escape.
Dysfunctionally knowledgeable about many things,
we enjoyed democracy and the absurdity of beer.

Currently he was engaged in repairs
for single women’s washing machines—
and if necessary their dryers—up and down the coast.
“It’s just switches and belts,” Roy.
Then Oscar invited me to stay at his place in the woods.
“You’ll run down and won’t make size sleeping
in the cheat grass, or you’ll get to groveling
with the banana slugs.
Recover from Luthor’s death at my place,
get some rest … we’ll build a redwood deck together.”

We left the Inn just before dusk,
driving uphill in a blue-and-black striped Rabbit.
Heading east on the Gainfill Road,
we passed a ragged house
with a couple of dozen feral cats asleep
on a pair of rusty Mustang convertibles.
Their cat food was stacked under a tarp on the roof.
We turned right through the mudhole
and drove into the Pygmy Forest.
“It don’t drain, the roots won’t go deep;
and those trees only make size to their roots.
So we’re in a hard place, with digitalis in the borrow pits,
and dwarf trees of many kinds.
The soil’s poor and overdrawn,
our perc tests are bad, no drainage.
Everyone in the Pygmy, even Glenna, pees outside.”
“Who?” “Her driveway’s back beside that mud hole.”

The Pygmy Forest ended abruptly—
it’s three hundred yards wide and two hundred miles long.
Further uphill, the subsurface changed to better drainage—
and the redwoods took over, narrowing the chalk road,
climbing through tall stands and scattered cabins.
A fog and rainfall country.
Blue and orange tarps shielded some possessions—
mostly old rusty beaters and moldy brokens
that needed hauling . . . but stayed.
At dusk we turned in to a small clearing,
which ran with the sun I supposed.
His home was a rough couple
of redwood rooms above a working area.
A second cabin stood alone in Oscar’s shamble
of discarded appliances, wood carvings,
and other diverse fascinating clutter.

Pointing to an older washing machine,
he called it “Glenna’s Whirlpool”
as we climbed irregular stairs to his apartment
with unfinished windows propped open for morning light.
A shimmed door faced a small-planked deck
the wood grain, planed to smooth,
had a polished bowl at its end.
Your eye followed the grain to the bowl,
till you came to Bob. A gray-black cat, “Bob Cat.”
From wherever he was, Oscar spoke in a soft tone,
“Hey, Bob.” Bob would turn, peer, and lift his tail.
He never knew those mustang cats,
and played with raccoons. Lonely Bob.

As the night closed, we descended to his shop,
which had the things shops should—a beaten bench
with its vise, a welder and old torch, splattered cabinets,
plus a giant wood stove. On cold nights, the old stove
burned sawdust or one of the failed projects.
His cabin and the other cabin were both strapped
to a pair of redwoods so they wouldn’t slide downhill.
Oscar showed me the Murphy Ladder
with a counterbalance rock that let me up
into my room full of moldy books.
Oscar left, and I made up the bed, lay down on the wool,
then listened to a low horn sound all through the night.

And the sound continued in the morning
when we explored Oscar’s woods.
We walked on a thick carpet of needles
that softened the tone
as Oscar mourned the loss of his tallest tree—
a stump called Eleanor couldn’t speak to him anymore.
Well, it’s a tough old world,
especially when you cut ‘em off at the stump.

Oscar used the kind of voice that cats like,
so Bob arrived and drank from Oscar’s domestic water supply,
a half-covered child’s pool at the edge of the clearing.
Raising the lid, I saw he used toilet hardware
to regulate his artesian stream —
carefully soldered copper lines.
Among them a few frogs slept in the darkness.
I still heard that warm soft horn from the night before.
Oscar said it was the ocean filtered through the trees.

I asked Oscar why he had come to the coast.
He said he’d retired from Lawrence Livermore,
met Glenna in Moe Inch’s Inn,
and bought some of her land to make a home.
His first one was a fast, plastic stretch frame …
which didn’t really matter
because he was there for the sound.

I brought the green bike up the following afternoon
and finish moving into the other cabin.
A Buddhist gardener hired me the next day.
My wages were spent on beer,
cigarettes, and the only food they had, nachos.

Over the next few weeks, Moe Inch’s Inn
served many kinds hiding in the fog
and the ongoing shade of the evergreen.

On clear evenings,
I rode the green bike down through the trees
opening into running pasture with standing sheep …
and the Pacific became a dusky slate changing to black.

Spring had passed by the time we began Oscar’s deck,
which meant digging holes downslope
to the hard, about four feet deep.
Oscar decided to reinforce his cabin—
unstable tied to a tree with ship cable.
“If my house slides downhill, they’ll find my body
on top of those buried pot-reefer vans.”
Bob watched us digging further down for footings;
and our slow pour made us gray-faced in Moe’s most nights.
The deck would sit on redwood posts set down in the holes;
the uprights were formed from his tallest redwood.
And as I’ve said, he cried over Eleanor.

Over the next few weeks, her redwood deck
slowly took shape … except when Oscar was hungover,
or in love with a washing machine’s owner.
During those times I did a little straightening
around his junkyard, changing it
to a simpler pile of things.

In the prior disorder, I discovered grow bags;
they were unsightly, and we loved putting dirt
in the holed bags— Oscar said a pot grower invented them,
but nobody remembered who.
Our scheme of landscaping was grow bags
with anything grow-bag-able.

Early summer passed with our building of the deck
Or my straightening the junkyard.
Then Glenna came over for her washing machine
and brought us some Alaskan Daisies.
We transplanted them into grow bags
before strapping the Whirlpool on top of her Scout.
Oscar’s job was done, mine was to help her unload.

Driving down to her place in the Pygmy Forest,
I found Glenna to be a red-haired, seductive woman.
I’d heard she gardened naked
in the sunlight and raised her son alone.
Then, while I unloaded the washer in her driveway,
she told me about losing everything when her house burned,
leaving only hot nails, except for her son’s toys—
Oscar had gone into the fire to save as many he could carry.
Manhandling the Whirlpool into her home,
before Glenna murmured something about Oscar’s demons,

I learned they’d rebuilt her small cabin
at the base of the Pygmy bowl.
After we loaded all her clothes into the machine,
I made to leave. Instead she invited me
to stay for a garden salad and got a little wicked
in the eyes and cleavage over wine.
But I spent the night on the couch.

In the morning, we drove her Scout
up the coast, even though it had dangerous tags.
We parked above an inlet
and clambered down a cliff to the sand.
Walking through sheets of wet foam to a cove,
we saw expectant birds resting on the edge of what they knew
and afternoon gulls perched on brown, beached seaweed.

Glenna calmly dove into the bitter cold sea,
and ripped pairs of abalone shells away from rocks.
We were frozen climbing up the cliff by sundown . . .
even colder at Moe’s after a shivering hour of playing pool.
Oscar bought the brandy; Glenna always won,
having learned the game as a weather girl
in LA where it was a useful skill.

Back at her place, Glenna lit her stove,
introduced me to pot and her body in a hot bath.
We never made it up to her bedroom
and made love by the stove, my body
tangled up in her thighs as she stroked my hands
Then she wandered through my brother’s death
and my dislike for school, before we slept at dawn.

That night we went to Oscar’s for dinner
and helped him steam artichokes and pound beans.
His stove was also lit while I chopped peppers into rice.
He said for openers,
“Glenna’s bones and these beans are a paradise.”
That’s right, chop ‘em into the rice with that Zen pole.
He continued his ramble into complex holes,
collisions tried in Livermore, and subatomic reductions
where every hole was the same.

After Glenna left, Bob licked his paws on my motorcycle
while I climbed the Murphy ladder into my room.
I couldn’t sleep and lit a fire —
wood roared and rattled the tin,
and the heat moved me to the window.
Appliances down below around the wood stack
encouraged me, but I ignored my writing piled on the floor.
Then Bob came in and lay on the writing; all it was,
was a couple of hundred poems
and a fragment about Oscar’s demons …
I thought about my own.

Next door Oscar slept in his complex hole,
Bob yawned, and I went to bed after the fire burned down.
Grow bags weren’t enough,
but the Alaskan Daisies grew well in my sleep.

In the morning, I woke from an ocean dream:
Searchlights lit offshore transactions,
plastic bales on the swells exchanged for bags of cash.
My dream closed with Moe Inch
unloading his pot boats to buy the Inn …
which was common knowledge around the bar.
Also, his dangerous girlfriend loved cocaine,
and her son had prenatal brain damage;
so Moe had been away, because his girlfriend’s crisis
required special care, money, and Moe.
Moe loved her son, but she was a bad soup for anyone.

That afternoon, in the Inn, I finally met Moe.
He was deep in the money shadows,
wearing a bookkeeper’s headlight.
He looked pleased to see me and said he’d buy the next pint
if I’d pay down my tab. We started comparing literary bars
and farms, after the bill was paid off.
I was struck when he said over our third beer his life
had become about closing the deal,
so I asked, “What are you here for?”
Emptying his glass, Moe said,
“I came for the woods down to the sea.”
Pleased to know the outlaw from Mindanao,
I restarted my tab.

A few weeks later the sound of things
was shattered when Moe and his family died in a fire.
The Inn never closed, and I didn’t go to the funeral,
but I heard all about it. Moe’s death tore deeply into Oscar,
driving his Rabbit through a grief-stricken bender
played out in the winding darkness up his narrow road.

Our friendship changed
when I hid my motorcycle behind a tree.
After scattering the gravel, an angrier Oscar
bellowed at the cat. Bob’s ears would flex,
cat eyes widening, an almost witless howling moan.
Night after night, something inside
drove Oscar up that road.
Bob slept with me, and I considered
asking Glenna for guidance.

Instead, I just allowed
the white-haired drunkard to slide
till the zebra-striped Rabbit
finally crashed into the redwood stack.
I got out of bed in the darkness,
and I heard him hit the stack again;
the second smash sent me tumbling down the ladder.
The deck was all over the car when I got there,
with Oscar sprawled on the ground;
among crumpled black-and-blue stripes
and disarrayed boards,

Oscar’s face was cracked open,
gushing blood from the nostrils while he shook.
He was mumbling about redwoods,
subatomic wrongs, and Eleanor,
while I carried him to the domestic water supply,
sat him by the child’s pool, and washed his face.

His Rabbit’s chest was broken in,
and his deck needed a restart.
Bob kept growling, and Oscar wouldn’t go to the doctor.
I called Glenna, and she repaired him early in the sunrise;
he fell asleep by midmorning,
while Glenna and I propped the deck.
She described his cycle of burn death and grief
begun when he’d lost his daughter,
Eleanor, in a gasoline fire.
Oscar had named his tallest tree for his daughter;
snapped after cutting her down; crashed after Moe burned.
We kept making rough repairs while Oscar slept on.

By two o’clock, both Glenna and I wanted to get away,
so we left for a motorcycle ride.
Fog wet our clothes before we cut inland for the heat—
our afternoon shadows
stretched down the road in the trailing light.
And our night was spent between some oaks.

The following afternoon we returned to the coast
and stopped at the Inn.

A little worried about Oscar,
Glenna went up to see how he was doing.
I climbed the stairs into Moe’s and sat at the bar.
A window let the pasture and ocean through.
Regulars gazed at the offshore fog
creeping in over the sheep
and listened to a languid story
drift around the heavy bar.
The bartender brought me a Guinness;
I picked up a newspaper and started reading
an article about the Cold War.

Another hour passed, then Glenna entered and sat down,
wearing pearls and looking hard at me—
so we walked outside to the bike.
She sighed past the mustang cats …
again when we turned into her low mud.
We walked her rough path through the Pygmy Forest,
sat on the counters in her kitchen. Lonely Bob was there.

Glenna described what was under the deck
made from Eleanor’s redwood,
the deck braces, and the extension cord he’d used.
We called the cops, but the sheriff came.
And we all felt like intruders on Oscar’s shady drive.
They brought him out,
laying him dead-faced next to his router table.
An ambulance hauled him away.
Then we dictated statements
and signed them back at Glenna’s.

Over the next few days, Glenna made the arrangements.
A mob from up and down the Coast came.
I didn’t go to the service, but I heard all about it.
Glenna told me later at her home;
then she listened to music in her garden.
That night we smoked in Glenna’s bed
beneath fluorescent stars — our smoke rings
rose and broke down against her false cosmos of a ceiling.
We canned her autumn garden over the weekend,
before I thanked Glenna and said good-bye.

I went up to Oscar’s and counted his trees,
counting to fifty-nine.

The counting seemed to follow me
down through the forest on the bike.
I nodded at red-faced women with jailed boyfriends
and rode out the Gainfill Road.
Then I climbed a mile-long rise
with a broken windmill on my right side.

Parking the motorcycle, I bent down
and stepped between two crusted fence wires,
and kept walking across spotty grass while the sheep ran off.
They run from everyone, they’re sheep.
Then, walking through scattered gorse and rocks,
I worked out ways to put things into foundations—
while closing to the windmill that’s lost half its vanes.

In my valley of farming,
I’d always thought of drainage as a reference to leaving.
I crossed to the twin mounds beneath the aging frame.
Understand: People don’t use permits on the North Coast.
They just put things in places.
So I left behind two Alaskan colored daisies . . .
and nodded at Oscar, and at Moe,
buried alongside beneath the windmill
next to where the sheep drink.
I won’t go to the redwoods that close to the sea again …

Needing a place
to rearrange some writing
I rolled into Yosemite on the one-way road.

They gave me a tent and a job as a potwasher.

Over time, the pot room became a place for the mind.
And I became the night man in a winter valley …

I’m a night man on the beach
being chased by the tide.

I gathered up some wood
and began to make a fire.

As the waves came in sevens,
one, two, and three.

The pull of the moon
bringing in the sea.

I need money time and shelter,
to write another while.

Returning to the fire to rearrange my pile.

Rearranging my pile.

Chose someone to talk to
feeling foolish by the heat.

Described an equation
of farm tools, land, and speed.

My choices were all simple,
keep living off the bike
or find a place for a year or more
and settle down to write.

I need money time and shelter,
to write another while.

Returning to the fire to rearrange my pile.

Rearranging my pile.

The bones finished burning.
The sea lulled me to sleep.

A storm was coming
so I started heading east …

Arriving with the storm
with forty dollars and a worn out bike.

Photographed in a Stetson hat
for the union 535.

I took the job, I took the job.
I took the job, I took the job.

Got a tent and an iron bed
An old school table and a rolling chair.

I swept and washed it out.
I said, I swept and washed it out.

I took the job, I took the job.
I took the job, I took the job.

We’re all cooks and cleaners on the line.
We all need money and time.

I’ll take the cash right now.
I’ll take the cash right now.
I took the job, I took the job; I took the job, I took the job …

Take the bus or ride the bike.

Punching in, start at five.
Greasy pans, dirty knives.

What’s the deal, Chef Mike?

I’m going home to write all night.

Greasy floors, loud machines.
Busy time, get em clean.
Mop the floors, wash the mats.
What’s the deal, Chef Mike?

I’m going home write all night
I’m going home write all night …

Yosemite is a small hole
in a the Sierra granite.
and I’ve got a job in the pot room
that works for a while.

I’ve been washing pans at night,
then writing poems and small pieces
about a low winter valley
while the snows are falling.

My employers are large
and impersonal, which is fine with me;
because I borrowed some tools
to write chef Mike a poem
asking for more hours.

But I hit the wrong button
on an office printer
sending it out to every office
the Delaware corporation has, except his.

But I’ve got better equipment now.
So thank you for the Christmas money
and lunch with Uncle Mike …

Evenings til midnight.
It’s white plastic walls
with brown tile floors
as the gray river freezes.

Some cooks burn, I’ve learned, some don’t,
they’re all in their supper years.

And knives scrape off burned onion scum.
The pot room’s a place for the mind.
The pot room’s a place for the mind.

I imagine a woman some nights.
My hands ache from lifting mats in the machine.
Speaking out loud to every last one.
Then my questions, they become …

How are your conditions?
God is all around us, where is your bedroom?

Into the future, with an old life.
This room is a place for the mind.
This room is a place for the mind …

I just came back from the waterfall,
in the shade of a granite wall.
Searching with a borrowed light,
the moon dropped down on a white tree night
with forest greens fading into blackness.

On my way through the valley snow,
wet grime by the meadow
I lost contact with the scene,
that granite is a changing thing.
That granite is changing into blackness
and whatever else fills the sky, whatever else fills the sky.

No, you’re never alone.
No, you’re never alone.

Surrounded by the changing abstract.
Surrounded by the changing abstract.
Surrounded by the changing abstract.

Time stood still in a western haze,
memorized as granite grays,
I drank with immortal logs
in the twisted woods of an evening fog
stepping down to tops of trees.
In the cold night feeling, and whatever
else fills the sky, whatever else fills the sky.

No, you’re never alone.
No, you’re never alone.

Surrounded by the changing abstract.
Surrounded by the changing abstract.
Surrounded by the changing abstract.
Surrounded by the changing abstract …

When the Yosemite sun goes down
sometimes I’ve gone to a stone bridge across the Merced River.

Where there’s a night feeling
between those night trees
along with whatever else fills the sky.

And your letter filled in the gaps this time.

While I sat on the stones
reading with a borrowed light
in the wind sound with a river down below.

Then on my way home, I wondered
if you’d written it

At a table or on your knees …

I’m not a believer, but I believe in people that do.
A paralyzed woman has asked for a poem, others have asked too.

So after work can you touch them with luck, not shooting stars,
and keep them from harder things.

The potroom is running cold tonight, and I hesitate in asking …

. . .

To a Yosemite Friend in Georgia,

When you’re crying in a lonely bed
and paralyzed young in your own way.

I hope that life
becomes an idea in the evening breeze
or a night wind at speed.

I know it’s not
but as the endless moment
you come from unfolds.

You’re young and you’re old.

I’m a grown man
who’s promised you a poem
and you have such pretty eyes …

A long piece of moving water
under the cold sun.
Or an aging motorcycle
riding down a river’s pretty leg.

It’s a day off. It’s a day off.

What’s my kind of life?

A farming desert where I kissed my wife.
After changing the night water in the moonlight.
After changing the night water in the moonlight.

Is there any more? Is there any more?

Is there any more water in the moonlight?
Is there any more …

An old woman on the bus took my seat,
surrounded by her bed light and her old things.
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne,
a great looking woman ready to die.

Maybe a widow in the dawn,
who’d played the oboe, but her oboe’s gone.
I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne.
I hope she gets to the symphony.

A mile south of the tracks
by an old schoolhouse full of the past,
she put it all away, her oboe’s gone, her oboe’s gone away.

An old woman on the bus took my seat
surrounded by her bed light and her old things.

I named her an Anne, maybe an Anne.
I named her Anne, maybe an Anne.
I named her Anne, maybe an Anne.
I named her Anne, maybe an Anne …

Forest fires outside the valley
meant there was no power in the park
and it was blacker than bare feet bottoms.
Everyone seemed to have flashlights
and candles except me. I was night blind,
avoiding the stumps on my way to the store
for beer and maybe a flashlight.
Inside lanterns glowed over crooked lines
and they were out of lights
so I just bought some warm beer
before walking up toward
the abandoned tents above the store.

My oversized Birkenstocks
carried a lot of sand on the rise
to the granite beneath Glacier Point,
where over time granite slabs have peeled down
and become shattered piles forming the Terrace.
A few stars flickered through the tree tops
as I shook sandal sand loose
and the rugged Terrace rose
seventy yards behind the store.
Working east in the twisted woods and boulders
I tripped through a landscape memorized
as rough granite grays and forest greens
fading into surrounding blackness.

Finally opening a beer in the shipwrecked boulders
I drank with immortal logs stretched longer
than horizontal rockets and kept swallowing,
nodding up at towering evergreens
the smoke filled valley smelled of burning pine
while the abandoned tents
seemed a gathering of stripped frames.
Leaning against one of the two by fours
a woman’s voice echoed from the far end
of the naked frames maybe asking for a companion.
She didn’t ask again. I opened another bottle
without pursuing her in the darkness, then swallowed
more beer on the way down from the Terrace.

Out of the woods and boulders,
I kept going down toward the meadow.
The power was still off after the beer store closed.
And when the apple grove opened onto the meadow
you could see how the western end of the valley
captured most of the smoke from El Portal.
I walked further and sat alone in the grass
surrounded by granite abstract,
except for the same few stars mixed with drifting ash.
Then the wind changed and I found
you’re never really alone with the surrounding abstract
as a few half words floated from the grass.
Three beers left, I opened one
and watched the lights on the canyon walls.
They were big wall climbers flashing lights
at some rangers bellowing back through bullhorns.
Swallowing my beer as voices swam from the meadow
telling them to switch the goddamn horns off.
Then the wind and moon descended on the sea of grass.
And a pot washer hour turned in the northern sky
while time stood still in the western haze.
Smoke drifted away and I went deeper into the sheep grass.

I was laying flat by the trees
when a leafy kind of woman’s whisper
surprised me wanting a cigarette for her journey.
I hand rolled her a Drum, then lit it
with one of my last wooden matches.
The woman had a sun stained face
above some worn travel clothes
she inhaled deeply as the fire still climbed
to that Spanish word for door
with the sound of an employee’s child
conceived in Boy’s Town.

Then she put her face into mine
whispering she’d found a man
hiding in the woods from the rangers.
Her English wandered like a low river.
I nodded as she kept whispering
that the man was a big wall climber
writing a book on physics.
I nodded again so she quickly placed her hands
lightly on my face saying he’d combined two kinds
of weirdness, what kind was mine?
Her question got my hands aching.
Somehow she must have understood
dropping her hands from my face
to crack my fingers one by one
while I asked myself what kind of weirdness was mine?

After my last finger cracked
I told her I’d been writing a letter to an imaginary woman.
Then the pot washer hour continued
and the wind blew over dry grass
before she asked if my woman had an odd name?

I said maybe,

She reached for a Drum and said her name was Johanna
Rolled two and after we smoked,
told me she’d been up in the boulders.
Was she hungry and broke?
No, but she needed to get cleaned.

We got up and Johanna moved through the grass
wearing a kind of dark cloak, brown, black or even green.
We turned right at the road and then we turned left
toward the ice rink and cleared the trees around the parking lot
where she stopped and stared
up at the south rim of Yosemite.
Standing and staring in a maroon cloak, maroon because
some halogens on a pole told me the color.
Nearby was the big green rental tent
and stupid battered trucks.
Johanna turned and faced the north wall.
A smoky kind of place
with the granite’s water stains
stepping down to the tops of the trees.
She looked at the wall for a while and asked my name
which was Roy, and Johanna said
she knew a place called that in New Mexico.
Then after moving a few yards away,
she spoke my name quietly.
And again throwing her head back at the granite.
Kept slowly turning around gazing at everything.

When I joined her,
she asked what was my kind of life?
A farming desert where I kissed my wife
after changing night water in the moonlight.

Is there anymore?
Well, over by my tent someone has a tomato
in a protective wire cage but the raccoons laugh
knowing the fruit will never come
because they hardly grow in the cool,
and I have a towel for you
and a key to the women’s shower …

Mormon dawn muttering through muttering rains
rolling past barns not farms.

Damp gravel road out of another town
passing the twisted frames inside biker graveyards.

Accidental rider shook quivered and died
now their sadness follows you from Utah
oily gray dawn, complicated rain, muttering pain,
twisted frame, biker blood in motorcycle graveyards.

Water Buffalo on the gravel road out of Utah.

My cook friend Glenn,
he told me once a long time ago,
he made a deal with himself,
when it’s time, he’d go.

Maybe in the spring, but better in the fall.
And never with the snow
when it’s time, my time to go,
Glenn said, my cook friend said,
Glenn said I’d know …

You know you’re hammered
when you’ve staggered to the machine in the rain
and bought Three Musketeers instead of Snickers.

And you misread the E-7.

So now you’ve got
a bag of those sun fire Cheetos.

Not the regular kind.

And there’s not enough water at the waterfall
to slake your thirst as those sunfire Cheetos burned your ass.

Then you died lonely from thirst.

And your body was found with orange teeth …

Last month I met a young girl.
She was 8 years old in a bar.

Her name was Lucia Rose Laz.

And we traded poems.

I gave her a copy of my Cheetoh Poem.
She game me a copy of her Rainbow Llama Poem.

So here it is.

Rainbow Llama Poem by Lucia Rose Laz.

When I walked to New York in the summer
with my shaved-hair guy friend,
we saw a rainbow llama on the way to Mexico.

But I don’t get it
we’re going to New York …

Angel Hicks was a centerfold
who was always in the middle of things.

Sometimes they’re blonde
more often they’re red,
depending where the evening leads.

She’s got a standard poodle with orange toenails
His name was six, but he goes by five.

Angel Hicks, she was a southern pro.
She did what she did to survive.

Well, I met her in the Groveland,
a hard little shot place in the middle of town.

She said she’d lied to all her lovers
before ever sitting down.

Angel Hicks was a centerfold
who was always in the middle of things.

Sometimes they’re blonde
more often they’re red,
depending where the evening leads.

Angel Hicks, she was a southern pro,
yeah Angel Hicks, she was a southern pro,
yeah Angel Hicks, she was a southern pro, yeah Angel Hicks! …

Using a lover’s old pen
and wearing a broken down harvest hat
I’m a Yosemite pot washer
offering you cold compass skies and cemeteries
with a sense of two a.m. on the grave stones.
South through the cedars
the moon colors snow streaked granite walls
like an old man’s hands.
And when you glance up
toward the timekeepers in Yosemite
they’re Lindbergh’s successors
leaving superb lines night after night and you hear
the same strange offerings to Woodie Guthrie.
Someday all my bones will be washed
in a sand colored river lined by black oaks
under a black sky in the nuance of the half life
But I’m here by the graves and scaffold branches
making an offering to absent trees
before the granite chairs and benches rise
to ramparts on the high ground
where the halflife on the high ground has a hard voice
with an entry fee lookin’ down and you work to stay there.

Apropos of nothing, I believe it was the political writer
Richard Reeves who said we hire them
for four of five decisions: the kind
that will last down the generations
Makes me wonder what kind of day
Abraham Lincoln was having when he decided
to set Yosemite beside thence, forward and forever free.
These moldering bodies and stones can’t tell me
but some minds see a long ways
past the graveyards and what’s to come.

Bob Dylan’s the cold copper name
of a suspicious old man on a national journey
telling us where he’s been.
His twisting voice has a nasal bass line now
and twelve string Rickenbackers in the background
of a perpetual mirror watched by strangers.
The blown harmonica thoughts hover over the land
with elbow driven pianos and pounding cat paw drums
on the high ground washing down to the downstream union
we all hold in our televisions.
Some time ago the voice evolved
from old stoves or a young boy’s radio.
Over the years lyrics are stubborn thieves
around our fires and easy chairs and there’s eight kinds
of voices in the nuance of the half life.
And sometimes the voice under the moon
becomes a nighthawk over the national diner
above that special land where the harmonicas have meaning.

I imagine that kind of half life is tiring
after climbing over the mountains
and stumbling into anthems.
Maybe it makes you feel like I’m nodding
at an unknown boy’s hole in this Yosemite graveyard
next to where the rangers sleep.
Instead I’m heading through the trees
toward the oneway road
where a white blanket covers eight acres of meadow
and the exchange of ideas has gone plastic.
The original climbers came in old Fords
with packs of Camels without knowing very many routes.
And their canvas baggage was heavier then.
Now the surrounding granite impounds big wall climbers
and changes the nature of marriage
when the jail’s behind the cedars.
Closer to home, there’s eight acres of meadow
with stars bursting over my canoe on the snowy asphalt
and where the hell is Mars as the snow falls
on my hat from overhanging trees.
My socks are swollen scum after washing
the residue of airport food in the Pot Room.
And the sky is shooting light over the Royal Arches
while I’m beggin’ on my bended knee
for more constellations and ships at sea.
But as my shoes track past the moonlit meadow
the larger granite asked if complex tools are necessary.
There’s always a man running straight up the slab
who doesn’t use any tools except for his hands
as the meat bees chase his ass.
And as the black meets the white shoulder blade
of HalfDome. I recalled how Guthrie fell
between the Brooklyn State Hospital
and the Grand Canyon at sundown.
But after he’s gone, I’m just a pot washer
walking from a Dylan graveyard in the pot washer hour
because the voice fifty miles out to sea
needs the universe to swallow him whole.
And the howling moon, she’ll feel lucky that the half life
pounded and whipped him into shape …

The undertow was flowing at two in the morning,
through the hollows, throught the draws,
til I came through a hole and into the wild
with a line about Lincoln’s shawl and Roosevelt’s chair.

I kept on following the right of way.
Of course I look tired and worn
cheat, starve, or leave,
I’m starting to see,
I’m just confused and shut down.

Further down the road through old Mississippi
with abandoned downtowns, but it’s jail still survived
blown pages in a sea of weeds by the tracks
bottomed out, whiskey drought.

My return left me an old man
where everything seemed bought or sold.
Cheat, starve, or leave,
I’m starting to see,
I’m just confused and shut down …

A book is almost never done, so it goes.
A second winter in the park, it told me so.
All those things I imagined.
Oh, they know.

There’s too much drink, I’m written out,
close the doors — it’s time to go.

Too much drink, I’m written out,
close the doors. Shipped the files,
cleaned the tent, packed the bike,
I’m written out, it’s time to go.

Down the mountains,
turning south, Mojave, New Mexico.

Down the mountains,
turning south, Mojave, New Mexico …

On the prairie at sundown,
there’s a diagonal highway where most don’t know
the time of day or distance to the next town.
I’d blown a tire by an oil field
and only had eleven dollars in quarters.

Getting dark when a trucker hauling a Caterpillar
stopped and asked where was I going, I said New Mexico.
The driver offered me a ride,
so we loaded my motorcycle up behind the tractor.
We were taciturn through a long black window night.

Our sun rose over scattered clouds
for another hundred miles
before he dropped me and the green bike off.
Roy, New Mexico at noon had a tire shop and store
where I called Johanna from their pay-phone.

But she wasn’t home
so I signed a work order for a new tire
put the quarters down and left my bike in their bay.
A gruff lady at the store gave me
a bundle of shopping bags
and said Johanna’s place
was an hour past a blue house.

So I started walking toward the blue house.
The old lady had described an adobe cube
on a rock hill with a rough wooden porch around it.
When I got toward the top I hollered at the cube.
But she wasn’t there
and on the other side I saw a wooden shed.
Back around to the front of the adobe,
I opened a plank door to a large window room.

An open interior with a rough kitchen table,
an old wagon bed, a splattered easel
with a haggard panorama, and a window chair
I thought I’d seen somewhere.

The carving underneath said, number 57 by Max Gonzales.
I knew Max from the Voluntary Jail and after pulling it around,
I sat through sunset in an old friend’s chair
as dusk tried to tell me something.
So I went into the kitchen and found her note on the table
saying to go ahead and use her shed
and whatever I could do for food.

Instead I went back to Max’s chair
and fell into a hard dream
about a man in a straw broom ruin
sweeping the same place
over and again till he got it right and died.
The broom multiplied into rows —
then rows into fields of straw brooms.

A New Mexican sun woke me stiff and cold at altitude.

I made and swallowed strong coffee for warmth
till the shadows withdrew
and I went to her shed with a straw broom,
a new shed made from old pieces,
I swept the grime into a corner
and shoveled the pile and wood stove ashes into a bag.
And after hosing everything down
the shed dried by afternoon.

She’d stacked a cord of wood against her house,
I carried an armload of splits into the shed.
An iron bed frame, mattress and rolling chair
were on the back porch.
So I got them into the shed too, found a hammer
and some nails in a kitchen drawer
to make a desk by the door.

By evening my desk and chair
were opposed to the bed in the front.
The wood stove and fuel on the far side.
My first place since Yosemite
and there weren’t any evergreens blocking the sun.
The stove lit easily before I went into her home
returning to the shed with my gear and a wooden box.

Gear was a blue tarp and three Yosemite blankets
wrapped around the weather suit.
Manuscripts were clamped to thin boards.
I unpacked a Robert Caro book on LBJ
along with the fifty brown paper shopping bags.
Spreading the green blanket across my desk,
laid out red pens, a copper ashtray and the paper bags,
also my children’s pictures and some candles.

Overturning the empty box
I put it by the iron bed, lit one of the candles
and made up the bed with two gray blankets.
Laying down on the flat wool, I imagined
sturdy chairs each one better than the one before.
But my shadows had gotten out of hand
till they calmed down with another candle on the desk.
Then I went over to Johanna’s for a beer
came back with a few and a mixed salad.

Leaning back in the chair, I recalled
the poet, Luthor Rollins using a phrase, ‘Moscow Salad’,
which was his way of emptying the refrigerator.
Finishing a beer, I added wood to the coals,
opened another beer
before rolling and lighting a Drum in the shed.

The writing began with smokey queries
crossing the prairie and then it left the questions far behind.
Words scrawled on shopping bags
about a diagonal highway where most don’t know
the time of day or distance to the next town.
I’d blown a tire near an oil field
and spent eleven dollars in quarters
by the time Johanna brought whiskey
and warmth to the iron bed …

We only met the one time
but she spoke down low asking me to join her.
A striking woman in a sleeveless dress,
we left the crowd and the torches
and walked down to the river below the yellow house.
The moon showed far side sycamores
as she stood smoking by the river sound.
She said her living came from satisfying men,
usually by the month and her friends called her Mrs. Holmes.

I said go on.

Several years before, she’d stalled her car
on the other side of the river as a horse and rider
pounded along the bank in and out of those trees.
They veered and rode over in the heat. His horse was lathered,
rearing as the rider asked if she had trouble.
She said yes to the old man and he left.
Twenty minutes later a truckload of mechanics arrived.
The following day, she waited by the river in the sycamores.

That’s how it began…

Women liked my grandfather because he was a brilliant man
with a fine cast to his head and his life was desirable.
She doubted if he ever really saw himself,
which made him even more attractive.
Also he was dying at the time and probably didn’t know that either.

I asked about her clients; she mostly passed. Did he understand?
Not at first but when she told him, nothing really changed.
A widower wrapped around several hundred thousand acres,
she imagined him changing the land and never saying very much.
To her he was a legend with a yellow mansion
describing young Jack Kennedy or getting wide on the guess rows.
She told him some of the shocking things in her life.
He watched his father die after a crop failure.

They met several times along the river before the pain got too bad,
talking about the boy running table after table in the pool halls.
Or seeing his wife fade before living it out
as an old man with a tremor by the wash of a stream.

I wish Mrs. Holmes had gone on
a voice calls out to “Naomi”.
but someone called out from the torches.
Facing them on our way back from the river sound.
She spoke of working men for money, said she still did,
Closing towards the crowd, she kept touching my arm,
so we paused before the torches with that last thing left between us.
It came when she moved off, turned
and asked if he’d driven himself to the hospital.

Later on, I rode out of Fresno on an oily gray motorcycle
and down through the years inside a national poem,
I’ve never forgotten her face when I said that he had …

I’ve often used people to talk to,
sometimes, my children, other times you.
So don’t be too concerned if I wonder
how you’re doing, just grab some nectarines
and get in that really great position in bed.

Our last episode was the night
of the New Mexican night lion.
Since then I’ve done some things.
The children have grown well.
Their mother lives in Missouri while I rode in and out
of the Hill Country, made a few Texas records.
Made a few more on the Oakland streets with my son.
Moved south into an Airstream trailer
on a Ventura road that the wildfires left alone.

I live there now below the mountains
called the Transverse Ranges.

This evening — I’m working
from the hard end of the pile –
Where my brother, Russell, got lost in the flow —
then two of my sisters, Sarah and Amanda —
whose lives closed not so ago.
My mother’s been gone a long time.
My father’s cough took him there too.
We’ve moved on from all those acres farmed
to other kinds of active poems with literary purposes.
In closing, I’m sending you a Moscow salad of writing
because you’re a woman I’ve always admired.
But tonight — we’re retiring with an aging tool. Meaning,
there’s an old musical player by my bed — an early Edison.
where they wound the cylinder
and lowered the needle into the wax.
Sending out a rough flawed sound —
which goes on until the thing runs down — Johanna…

Every once in a while
I’ll ride west from Fresno to Mendota.
Veer southwest from Mendota,
twenty minutes or so across the San Luis Canal.
Then head generally south on dusty roads
a few more miles till you come to my parents’
old wooden shack on the Cheney Ranch.
An austere flat roof ruin on mostly abandoned land
along the water right of way to L.A.
The surrounds are beige alluvium from the Coast Range
off to the west and there’s some rough mountains
up there named after a girl, who grew
to be an old woman, probably died long ago.

Often you can’t see the mountains
because they’re behind dirty air.
The ruined shack itself is barely alive in the late afternoon.
I parked the white bike and went inside.
Gray rotting tires and broken sprinkler pieces
kept the walls from falling in, and my mother’s first kitchen
was painted a very bad — aqua.

I went outside and rolled a smoke.
Across the road there was a faded yellow crawler tractor
on the edge of a dry field and in the old days
it was about time for the shift change —
where the day man had to get ready for the night man.

He would aim his tractor and disk
toward the rough mountains named after the girl.
Disk to far end of the field, that was called a through,
turn around and come back beside the through,
that was called a round. Move south half a telephone pole
and do it again six or seven times.
That was called laying lands for the night man
because the night man couldn’t see the mountains.

And whatever kind of woman
the girl became, that was some seventy years ago —
and now the dirty air has changed things.
In the late afternoon, the dust of the matter blocks your sight
so you can’t lay lands to the woman anymore …

There’s a wall across the street — so they call it Wall St.
It was one of those nights I’d gotten lost inside a stanza —
when I heard a couple on their way to somewhere,
talking on the wall. The broken sounds
of their conversation carried into my Airstream.

Yeas — Nays

I listened and nodded at the spaces
between the yeas and nays —
which triggered some odd memories —
one on the legendary black woman who raised me —
then won a very big bet — so I made her into a Rainfall Hazel.

Next — I wrote down another woman
who spoke five languages, seven if you include dog and cat.
Johanna wore ungodly manila panties,
a wicker Thanksgiving basket at the crotch —
a cornucopia of benevolence —
a dynamic cheetah on the motorcycle.

My overall conditions were a little ragged.
Ventura weather was mild. Quesadillas kept coming.
Stars watched over my slab. White bike was tucked away.
Last year’s murder at the gate felt long gone.

Mudslides and cellos mean bad news — Margins narrowed.
Dogs howled. The couple went their way …

Yeaaah, ahhh yowl

Dear Mr. Wildcat,

Peter Stafford called this morning
to tell me about Seth’s death.
Your brother was a timeless friend of mine
and also to both of my children.
A very fine guy and by the age of 36
Seth was the creative force
in hundreds of Austin productions as a writer,
vocalist, world class bass player,
generous sound engineer and producer.
But I knew him mostly as a friend and lifetime teacher,
a quiet young man who taught me about musical structure
and courage because he had a lot of that.
Early on — Seth gave away a constant stream
of knowledge along with the rest of the band,
Peter Stafford, then Winston, Landis Armstrong
and finally, Joey Thompson.
The man made me better than I am
while providing guidance in the studio,
the kitchen and live microphones on the road.
He was central to the creation of my artistic character
in the ‘Not so Damn Bad’, ‘Maybe an Anne’,
and the ‘Panorama’.
Then there are so many other memories
like the night he brought a couple bottles
of NightTrain to the wood shop
for the ‘Rain Prayer Demo’.
And of course onstage where the language of sound
involves the meaning of everything —
you look to your right to find Seth playing
memorable bass lines with that great green bass
and his shirt is off and you got those nipple rings too.
Seth was a special friend.
So Mr. Jimmy Wildcat, I’ll miss Seth Gibbs
because I loved him as you do.
With great respect to you and yours,

Roy Ruth …

When you’re early you hide behind garbage cans
and the stench doesn’t capture the feeling of the city.
Your mind has dried up and you count everyone’s steps.
But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.

A cop presides over the cars
and sounds and windblown voices
The barkeep don’t notice you’re filthy,
a morning beer and you don’t either
Cuz you really haven’t slept in days
watching the buildings rise and fall.
But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.
But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.

It’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.
But it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad.
But it’s the not so damn bad the not so damn bad.
Yeah, it’s the not so damn bad, the not so damn bad …

Sometimes, once in a while, but not too often,
I’ll visit some old familiar friends in my Airstream.

The midnight magic of a Willie Mays swing and a miss,
or the muddy fields of Baltimore with Johnny Unitas and the Colts
flowing into Secretariat running alone into legend at the Belmont.

Greatness is revealed in strange ways and forms — the Wizard of Oz,
Jackson Pollack and Lincoln’s letters. Peaceful Bones, enough said …

Capridae was born gray
in the wrong kind of grayness found.
She didn’t get to put her baby arms around her mom.
So we honor her mother and father
and any other kind of sadness found.
And since you’re up there runnin’
Where the stars and planets abound.
We need you to be a watchful baby girl,
who can help us out from time to time.

Tell us what it’s like out there … beyond our world …
Beyond ourselves.
You said to turn right at Andromeda …
Stay pretty and clean with the blues and greens, Capridae
Cuz we’re all comin’ to see you …
Yeah we’re all comin’…
We’re all comin’ to see you, Capridae.

And since you’re out there runnin’
where the stars and planets abound.
We need you to be a watchful baby girl,
who can help us out from time to time
cuz we don’t know what’s out there, beyond our world.

So as we honor your mother and father
And get ourselves on past the Andromeda.
You go on staying pretty and clean, Capridae.

Cuz we’re all coming to see ya …
Yeah we’re all com-in’…
Yeah we’re all comin’ to see you, Capridae.
Oh, we’re all comin’ to see you.
Yeah we’re all comin’…
Yeah we’re all comin’ to see ya, Capridae …

One evening at Joanna’s in New Mexico —
Mr. Red, a hairy red cat slept on her lap
as she asked about my hat.
So — I looked back across time and told her
about those cold harsh rains in the Mendocino redwoods
just above the dwarf trees in the Pygmy Forest.
Bought a flat brim Stetson at a hardware store.
Found they warmed up your days and gave you a place
to keep your keys and smokes at night …
Years have passed
and I’ve gone through six or seven by now.
All of them fine tools, some given to family —
others to friends.
This last one is worn and weathered
like it’s almost done.
Guess I might be too.
Bought it in south Austin, Texas —
off of Congress Avenue on my way
into Stuart Sullivan’s Wire Recording —
where a band called the Potwashers
played a background piece called ‘Panorama’.
Stuart and I had asked for liquid — but we got fluid instead.

All of us are wrapped and warped by passing time.
You could say — from the dwarf trees of many kinds —
through the motorcycle years — we’ve written a panorama —
and the worn and weathered hats — have seen it all …

by Justin Morgan

Demonstrate that the view of a camera
panning across the landscape captures perfect wonderment.

FIRST:
Let Y with respect to some unknown, x, be the view
of the camera panning across the landscape.

THEN:
Where f with respect to time, t, is the underlying sum
of these views then the derivative of f must be Y.

Therefore it must follow:

Y(x) = f’(t)
f(t) = g’(dreams)
g’(dreams) = h(SIN(φ))
g(dreams) = ∫ h
∫ h = [Perfect Wonderment]
Y(x) = [Perfect Wonderment]
Q.E.D.

All Rise…

Your Honor, at first I asked Hector
of the Public Defender’s Office to give you this letter.
But since he’s moved on to larger things — I’ve done it myself.
This is meant both as a gesture of respect
and also for me to gain some perspective
on my D.U.I. arrest, appearances in your court,
followed by a 60 day sentence in the County Jail.
Before surrendering, I left my lighter in the courthouse bushes,
appeared in court, was shackled
and taken through the tunnel into jail.
Throughout the fall and into winter
I’ve thought about this letter.
In the meantime I briefly looked into your life and history.
I admired your athletic, legal and judicial careers
and how you and your friend, the neurologist,
are encouraging young people in local high schools.
Over the years the cultural road
has taught me to size up character.
I have done that with you — also, Hector.

My own mostly came from desert farms
and a house full of history, where my people
were good at hard things
and the personalities were wide and varied.
In my early twenties I married a Kansas farm girl
who’d come out to California to break up large farms.
We had two children before the marriage shattered,
and I left the desert farming to find a better self.
My attorney and others suggested writing
because it didn’t require wealth.
Reading deeply for the next seven or eight years,
I rode all over the United States on junkyard motorcycles.
Started writing in Austin, Texas,
because you could ride year around.
And even though I got through school
without finishing a paper,
I established a literary style and voice —
along with a flair for musical production,
mostly in Austin and later on in Oakland.
My vehicle became an evolving street man
who replaced farming with writing.
Some of the language was financed in Yosemite
by working as a pot washer in an industrial kitchen —
so my bands became the Austin
and the Oakland Potwashers.

I’d ridden out to Austin to rearrange years of sound —
Then I rode back across the Southwest
and stopped — at a motel across from a steakhouse.
Checked in, gassed up and went to dinner.
Ate alone at the bar. Drank three beers with whiskey shots,
met some film guys, had two more and left.
The motorcycle wouldn’t trigger the stoplight,
forcing a turn west into a hit and run
crime scene at Panorama,
which turned into a D.U.I. arrest. Waiting to make a u-turn,
maybe the officer just liked the white bike. I’ll never know.
But there was a lot going on at the crime scene,
which played out over the next several months
as I made seven trips to the courthouse.
My counsel over the phone was an old friend
who has a similar background to yours without the judgeship.
I met Hector the public defender on my fifth trip,
then you on my sixth, saying I do, I have, I will,
and surrendered on my seventh.
I’d told Hector that with all of that, you gotta call it a D.U.I.
and they’ve got the law, guns and keys.

At the time — we were in early conversations
with a production company.
My daughter would soon deliver a second grandchild.
An older sister of mine was terminally ill.
Needing to get the county behind me,
I chose the most direct resolution in terms of calendar time.
Jail itself was not so hard, but it was constant noise
while reading fifty bad paperbacks
and becoming a homey of sorts. Hector came to see me
a few nights before completion.
Upon release, I found the lighter
left in the courthouse bushes
and made the production deal a couple of days later.
My daughter delivered a boy in early December
and I got to see my sister a final time.
These pages were written
up in Oakland after the Ghost Ship Fire.
For me — it’s all in the past. Yet we may meet again
when this letter gets delivered. I hope that we do,
your Honor. Be well.

Roy Ruth …

I spent a summer
writing in a garage across from the zoo,
where you could hear the monkeys screaming
at the freight trains every night.
Jack was an A.A. legend
I got to know at the morning cafe —
a failed Boston Globe sportswriter
who talked sports using a Boston growl.
We’d never known each others last names,
just Roy and Jack till one day he waved me over.

Said he’d gotten traded by the Globe to the L.A. Times
because of Sid Caesar disease. (Alcohol)
I nodded and sat down. He said well it didn’t work out.
He’d gotten mugged in a drunkard’s alley
and ended up in the hospital.
Blood alcohol — .26. That’s a lot
and he agreed that it really was.
So he married the nurse, quit drinking,
moved to a Central Valley town.
Had a boy with her named Danny.
The nurse soon died and Jack raised Danny alone.

Now Jack was a stranger in the valley town.
Reading the local papers — big man this and big man that.
Then he leans forward into my face.
Back in the L.A. days — he’d gone to a political fundraiser
at the Ambassador Hotel for the open bar.
Got there late, had a couple of Manhattans
in the ballroom, maybe five,
and sat down at a table by an elderly man.
They started talking — Tennessee Walking Horses mostly.
Old man knew all about ’em, hocks and tails.
bloodlines and withers. Very smart guy.
Jack called the man a long shadow.

Now let’s wrap it up — Jack moves to the valley town.
Wife lost to cancer. Danny grows.
Jack reads that the big man had died.
Sees a picture in the Fresno Bee.
Says my grandfather
was the Tennessee horse guy in the ballroom …

Every morning the girl next door
wakes to the sound of her hamsters feet running in place.
And her hamster never really said where he’d been.
So when the girl asked her mother, her mother said
the hamsters don’t speak German or Polish.
In fact they don’t know much — but her mom was wrong.
Because the hamster read the ‘Boys of Summer’
just the other evening and cried when he finished,
a big sad hamster with his forelegs
wrapped around an American classic,
kind of like a tragic Greek
because baseball was too big for him.
Whispering how carrots were better
in his grandfather’s time.
Then sadness poured from the hamster
as he released his feelings
about flunking school,
because he watched too much baseball,
and all that he really wanted to do
was to be sportswriter.

So the girl asked her hamster
why not write for tv.
But the exhausted hamster
just slept in her glove…

We need warm rains, informing rains,
rains for our obligations. No more lowering streams
and diminished flows. Just reminders where the water goes,
Just reminders where the water goes
Send us rain for our obligations.
Rains for our obligations, i
nforming rains, where the water goes.
Send us rains, we need warm rains, informing rains,
just reminders where the water goes.
Send us rain for our obligations.

Mmmmmmhhh — Aahhhha.

How’s the goddamn sky? — Mmmmmhh.
The sky is dry — Aahhhha.

We need warm rains, informing rains,
rains for our obligations.
No more lowering or diminished flows.
Just reminders where the water goes.
Just reminders where the water goes.
Send us rain for our obligations.
Send us rain, informing rain…

I’ve owned several old motorcycles
with worn engines that sounded like coin bang
in washing machines — I rode an oily gray bike
before the mustard brown and my hard green Italian — .
but this is what happened on the white bike
while moving in and out of rains
in a twenty-five mile an hour curve
as I kept going toward Big Sur with some bad words
and some other words that I had — A rough line
about a swollen man on an ocean road where the hills
washed down to the sea in a race with a storm.
Then it got late near Big Sur — I hadn’t written
for a while — and could only give it a day …

My earthly dreams are mostly time warped and financial,
meaning they’re meaningless. But this dream began
outside a pool hall on my way out of town.
A toothless old woman handed me a ham and Swiss on rye
with toasted bread, Best Foods Mayonnaise,
diced martini olives. I ate the sandwich
standing by the motorcycle.
It was good and I wish I’d told her so.
Instead I rode north into nocturnal fog
for several miles till I got involved in a greasy mudslide
on the Pacific Coast Highway near the sea.
My shattered body went cold on the sand
and colder still in the medical van
while the E.M.T.’s talked pro basketball
on the way to the morgue.

The next day a county coroner
made the large Y incision and scooped me out
and pronounced my cause of death.
But I wasn’t buried in a hole in the ground
because that afternoon my spirit
abandoned the planet and joined the Being.

Over time, lots of time, I became an ethereal wanderer
through Catholic portals and Buddhist tunnels
into a vast kind of spiritual; gathering speed
through the vocals that were mostly Emmylou Harris
or Otis Redding. And a billion more years passed
as a traveller waiting for my next role,
be it a mineral or a wave, a stripe or a solid,
somewhat bored by the backspin voyage to somewhere else.
Instead, I became a steady state actor
in an arena where the vastness
and shimmering stadium crowds
meant the rules had changed.
So much so that they landed me
by a pair of unfamiliar personalities called the two Neils.
One was Neil Armstrong,
the other, Neil Young.
Both had good eyes, saying there were no wars
or major errors in my life. I disagreed. Crowds roared.
The two Neils ran me homeward.
The umpire ushered me out of the stadium.

Outside there was a graveled path leading
to a stack of worn tires,
telling me to veer at the old Cadillacs.
I did and the path lowered to a ruby river
with a battered Airstream trailer on a plastic raft.
Looking back, the tires, stadium
and both those Neils were gone.
Didn’t recognize the river, could have been
the upper Yangtze or lower Platte.
Indeed. Time passed and a woman appeared
telling me she was Johanna Sachs
and that we’d met one night in the Yosemite sheep grass
and again in New Mexico.

Johanna offered me
a simple ham and Swiss on rye for our journey.
We ate the sandwiches inside her trailer
which had curving walls around an iron bed
with horizontal paintings of cats.
Afterwards she untied from the dock,
releasing us downstream,
a ghostly raft drifting into a prelude
because the Signmaker had told her to.
The river drained the sounds of things
as the weathered woman explained the Signmaker
as the downstream general manager,
making her his captain of the out there,
while some more time passed
and fluid civilizations rose and fell
and their gains and losses turned to dust and gas,
leaving us pleased with ourselves.

And furthermore, everything downstream
seemed a little vague till our last evening when Johanna
called out to the Signmaker, saying as an aside
some called him the Big Guy, she called him Dave.

But I’ll always wonder if he just wanted to be left alone,
because the Big Guy/Dave just closed down the show
sending Johanna over the side; leaving me adrift
in some female memories and ruby fluids.

So my odd dream closed as the sun rose.
And sometimes inside the Airstream you’re the there,
and the not there – or the maybe in between,
where you couldn’t weigh both ends —
the billion years of Otis and Emmylou,
Johanna Sachs and the two Neils.
But if the Signmaker waits beyond energy and force,
then the entire thing is at least a choice
made in borrowing a voice —
fueled by an old woman’s Best Foods Mayonnaise,
well toasted rye, diced martini olives.

Goodbye…

I should remind you over twenty years ago
my old motorcycle flew over a cliff into the Horse Canyon
and you helped me resolve the wreckage then
So tonight I’ve come back again.

For openers, you’ve done enough already
the Kansas farm girl, our two children, our granddaughter,
a lifetime of wisdom from the graphic artist,
my brother, and my brother’s wife,
all those musicians and engineers,
stamina and gasoline, consumed on the endless gravel road.

I know that mechanics don’t top the hierarchy.

But since you are my guy
and the ball has bounced strange and rolled wrong for quite a few
lets send a message to my hairy dog and enormous cat
telling Buddy and Oscar to wait by the swaying bridge.

And if there truly be cosmic writers and referees of universal rules
peaceful love and unified physics toward all of you.

And Dearest Mechanical God Above,
with all the humility of a stainless steel tool I need some help
pouring a fortune into a righteous pile of a poem
that started off sort of true, now rearranged into fiction.

My errors are as countless as the broken souls
crawling from the swamps and borrow pits.
So maybe redemption’s just as easy, or hard,
or as big, as a legendary womanizer saying
“Well we screwed up at the Bay of Pigs, lets go to the moon.”

I’m writing inside a cold austere room
and going into my pocket for a smoke
but a flow of black ink has soaked through my shirt
which means my pen is uncapped
leading me to cap it and cease for now . . .