Four Corners Postcards - Arizona

To work, I need a badge. To speak, I need a password.
It's like that here, too. It's inaccessible. There are codes.
One may search in vain for borders
for the white man's states, or the tribal lands,
or the towns or dwellings or mesas, but there are no
signs, fences, numbers. Cattle graze freely
along the street.

Homes are dropped
like small perversions
on the patterns of the land;
the roofs of some have tires
to damp the clanging of the rain,
while other tins are ripped off
like sardine cans by a vengeful wind.

Random strings of towns,
some burned and boarded up
and dressed in war graffiti,
some with brand new chapter
houses, social service centers,
a bright corral of schools, all
built from coal extraction
that pollutes the canyonlands.

The occasional drunk, wobbling to be vertical,
like the occasional sheep, turning anything green into food,
seems to savor the destitution, as all humans
savor sadness, they choose it, before any thing,
it's in the nature - of our grazing -
to nurture the victim
in the glow of circumstance.

But these views, soothingly familiar, are only gifts
to keep the landscape safe—from us,
to avert a voyeur's eyes,

For humans here
are invisible as rabbits.
They tell of the future like the owls.
They are like horses, standing head to tail,
swatting flies off each other's faces, caring,
attentive, for hours—while we can bear
their stare for but a moment.


The road due west
goes straight into
the blackness
of spiders and ants,
the societies of
the Great Mystery.


The cities are inhuman.
The view off of the
long plains
pure illusion.

The pain here is not of people, but of the Earth
being healed.

And I've been left outside,
blind before the glyphs left by alien Gods,
deaf before a wind that speaks a foreign tongue,
jabbering on while a silence slowly builds.