Last Water
The last drop
of water in Meteor City,
a parched hole in the desert
with a few mobile homes, maybe,
echoes of steel pedal romantics
in action, still seeking factions
to fight off Black Mesa coal companies,
joining other drops of water, rising,
to make or break into clouds,
cloud computing sympathies
and waving into grains:
Behold, the national sacrifice areas,
the place once known as First Water,
a ten-thousand-year walk by the third drop,
pushed through sandstone beneath concrete
sidewalks in the city, good to the last cop,
wearing a belt secretly glowing of uranium,
coal and waters pressurized through slurry pipes
by chicken hawks, or, black parking lot crows
big-breasted, looking slightly tasty,
as we walk home, desolate and lonely
back into the wilderness, two Pahannas
who pretended to understand for a decade
the pain of sacred springs drying up,
the kachinas dancing down to mathematic,
automated figures at your cash registers,
ya, you, you know who, how do you do,
say halleluja, as you carve into up into space masks
inserting pictures of the glassy knolls, hogan holes,
Merlin's magic wands to the center of the crystalline earth
The fourth drop of water, a drip down the throat,
issued through a rubber tube, hardly enough
to rush down the rocks of the red desert stream,
the drying heat of seventy-mile-per-hour winds
jack ripping, ripping jack
over the navel of the fourth world
powered by the Navajo generational station,
the dynamite that broke the highway,
the lions of commerce, roaring and erect,
bread bears, steel-eyed salmons from far away
dreaming up plumes of steams, making cloud,
making raining, falling onto the earth again,
the fifth drop of water, most likely your last,
video punked across the nation, one last drop
of coffee on the tongue for salvation,
one last drop for the animals of immigration,
a red dirt crust of crunchy sourdough
for order on the border, an entire stitch
of moleculed waters for a set of signals
for the matrix, a crowd, a crisis swamping
into a last great flood, for one last river boat,
one last drop of ink on a single sheet of paper,
rippling now into a red stratos curtain
like a flug hung upside down across
the Little Colorado River Valley
as the national canyon anthem sounds off:
O say can you tame the raw dead Sainty Clause,
O disbelievers, O, pain relievers of our kitchen sink,
the green tinge of tornadoes, predicted by the hour,
moving north almost fast as the brown soldiers
on the Hopi mesas holding back the end of the world,
wearing the many coasts of winter, still, in the mourning chill,
cast off in spring around the small hogan rooms
in a confusion about the new currents,
closing the roads in the Dust Bowl daze
of explosive gusts, that last water
summed up by sweet sugar fairies
draining into hot choco-lates
in the nasty Nestles
of your no longer say so,
into Perrier bottles
for celebrities,
public relations
people fibbing up
Fijis tipped
for industry,
petting down,
your last puddle,
your last well,
your last water
stolen and sold
in the grocery
store
aisle,
and kept in
in the phaoroh's urn
of our mutual
no more
say
so
Survival in the Spring
The fool moon
is an unjust cliche
passing directly overhead
and I've ached out of exhaustion
so many times the tired millions
of meteoric terrors, media-mad errors,
the pa-rum-pum-pum of Christmas,
now long behind us, is only the echo
of a car crash we never witnessed,
only heard in the siren song
beneath the loud roar of daily trains
passing along the highway,
and our soft whispers
muted in each minute of distance
remains as a glassy tranquility
in the lunar space, the ice nine
of the night sky, as the dust swirls
into a sound so lonely,
a solace at the end of March,
we thank the great sky
for no more murder
The white stripe of the local skunk,
confused as the buds on trees,
in unending misunderstanding
of the new weather patterns,
limbs freezing then thawing,
chilling over again, forgotten
as the breeze, teasing towels
of numerous cold showers
for all seasons in a single day,
twenty-four-hour revelations
of the mountain lion warning us
with a growl in the Gaian solace
at midnight into the back-stepping
mystery of the morning, cars running
late, buses running late, trucks,
running furious late to avoid garbage beasts,
cement mixers awake, alive as thirsty ants,
churning up into government, then corporations,
into bellicose budgies happy to pave the world
Gone are those long lost minutes
where you unleashed your moorings,
when your screamed out your sorrows
and locked your mechanical door
without a master as the snow storm's
marshal lawyer, a colonel clinking
his dry cup for a salute of sunless,
derisive, jarring melodies unheard,
the fire of the gut-rotten belly,
rip-ribbed fat, toothless and mean
in his oily flannel cotton shirt:
O, who is chuckling now, you cheating
Chubby Checker! We are free of you.
Free! And winter is a dead and past
as we feel well enough
to start worrying again
about what is normal,
as our eyes, moist in emotion,
push out the main street iron
ions of ancient dirt, seeking
to join the information flow
of geese, buzzards and eagles
flying north into the blindness
of the king, the queen, the jesters
jeering in the crowd, the black crows,
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere
to regain unearthly sanity
