The river from a
distance is blue.
Sloops skirr, caps glow, the force of life
moves
The cargo of what’s new, from Andalusia
And
Vanuatu, some lavender from Bulgaria,
Mongol overtone song,
Malagassy kilalaky,
Osmanthus flower jelly with
wolfberries,
Ambergris, cinnabar, kalimbas, white tigers,
Cities of
painted opinions, lists of theorists
Who cannot be proven
wrong, first-edition
Books in indecipherable tongues.
There’s a
constant whirr of water, somewhere,
A long-rumored ancient
river. Our home, however,
Is in the desert, where rocks breathe,
clouds paint,
Grass tells stories with rhythms
inexplicable,
Where washes imply oceans, peaks break into
flight,
Lizards are the Jesus’s of cool
And birds give
every chakral hue a guru.
Today there appeared another
puddle
Subtly snaked along the foundation rim,
Shedding its
unwelcome sheen like a second skin,
For it ruins what
would stand on its own,
To infest with its mold, the mud
consensus
Grainy coat of waste, the half-digested
Pulp,
composed out of darkness, slippery,
Fetid and fungal, laced with
children’s blood,
Pharmaceuticals, occulted playing
cards,
Worn out rhetoric and tires, rotted coagulate.
It’s
work for the rats, to break down, shit on,
Take what will never
be missed, the distant
Insinuation that nothing survives.
On the mesas,
with high-pressure clouds
And its desiccate vistas of
weeds
For as far as you can see, the colors
Are faded, the
noises dimmed, the cactus
And mesquite cruel substitutes for
green.
Yet we live here, without hearing you,
Fearing what
we may say to your river.
May you ride, may you ride, in your
dark, doomed dream,
Never needing to know what we’ve
learned,
What awaits down-river, what is already here.
