Four Corners Postcards - New Mexico

In New York City they use terms like "anarchical plutocracy,"
but here on the ground north of haunted Albuquerque,
it's so real it's in the dirt.

We rode fifty miles from Durango:

spandex outdoor wear,
dueling sushi bookstores,
Trail Roamers for day rent,
organic gardening
accouterments, where
people from Missouri go to see
a white, Victorian Main Street
and shop for touchstones
of dreamed realities;
to Farmington:

low-rent mini-marts,
an airport in prison wire,
Red Top pawn, auto salvage
farms, work release factories
making springs and drill bits,
Toolpushers,
ice machines,
fry bread.

In a green mobile home,
there's drive-
through food,
a lady with stars
tattooed
on her brow
watches boxing on TV, sells Dark Eyes Vodka
in a cage.

Now we're on
Navajo time,
some show up
for work
two weeks late,
some never
show at all,
the town straddles
the rez to keep
the river
white

but all is lost.


There's too much pain for so little river:


There's only the sound of the wind.



We drive,
Mike and I,
in the largeness
of bourbon.
Only our eyes
speak of our
children
who dived off
the cliffs,
of the women
who'd rather
stay

insane than
forgive us,
of the treaties
we were forced
to sign,
soon nullified --

There's bourbon to suppress
the sense we make of all this,

and bourbon coats the dust, of this place
without a mistress,


where dirt and dirt alone
is all that one can build from.