Bad Meal in Tucson

For Greg Brown

Mi huenco sin ti, ciudad, sin tus muertos que comen,
Ecuestre por mi vida definativamente anclada. - Lorca

[ “My emptied space without you, city, without your voracious dead./Rider through my life finally at anchor.”]

“Tucson has become a Southwest center for opera, theater, ballet, symphony, and visual arts, a remarkable feat for a city of its size” – Tucson Chamber of Commerce

A history of ghosts goes into this—
The plastic banner citing Tucson Weekly:
“Taboulleh like the Garden of Eden on a plate.”
But there’s no one in the café to care what paradise may taste like,
For here, it’s nothing curious, just another enlargement of the
fine mad arts,
Which promise to make that pain, if nurtured long enough, immortal.
The students look so pleased, so virile, as they huddle in the Starbucks seeming to smile,
Until you catch their empty eyes and you are not there.

The neighborhoods at night do not throb with expectation,
No strung colored lights or mariachi bass from these backyards.
Instead, behind the soft mist of lightbulbs,
It’s like an antique shawl has been laid over the homes
To shadow and weigh whatever hope may lie within,
To make it small enough for diversion:
Beggars covered with safety pins,
Vacant buildings disguised as lofts,
Poseur emo parties without clove cigarettes where they circulate
like skeletons
And the artificial red hair is as thick as creosote after it rains.

Some, trying to make sense of this dream, pull down the blinds,
Get curled in a ball, light joint after joint and write reams of paper
Documenting all the weirdness—writing that in the end is gibberish. [like, uh, this ]

9000 feet out of town, the most ancient wisdom on the planet
waits for them
To answer all their questions with its silence,
But no one dares venture to the wilderness of rocks
Where the water can wash the black base roots clean away
And send them to freedom, to a life they don’t have to share
With a deranged mistress from the fifties who gives them roofies.
For the haunted, the one-way roads out of town always spin right
back in to the center.

We had a car, and a newer map, so we only walked through one
nightmare:
The train station, historic register brand new, unhealthily clean,
Feeling cramped without one person inside
Save an Amtrak bureaucrat, glaring eerily as if he was blind,
A Velcro schedule to the side: one train East, one train West,
times unknown at this time.
At Tucson, no one comes, no one goes,
It’s just another picture to keep those trapped there to see
they're not trapped there,
Iron bars never quite locking around the doors.