Mythville

Oak Creek Fire

Set the silver watch

to the price being right,

the Oak Creek Canyon fire

needs to die tonight

As the rain dancers gather

for a fly above the San Francisco Peaks,

in the valleys the clouds,

seeded by puffs of purple smoke

collect and circle

to the holy resolution

for a secret peace,

the gravity running to ground,

life as electricity for a brief lease

as minotaurs tower and Kachinas

yearn to speak to lost souls

drying like water in their graves

Five miles east

wind in my face

and the fire plume,

a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,

the white wash coat of burned juniper

forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,

the mountain fizzling out

in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts

blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list

of what we would need when

the call for evacuation came,

craving a disaster to bring

the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk

their way across the red ridge,

red with weather; precious things

shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,

the wind pushing down in atomic bundles

of white orange flasks of violence,

a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,

a blowout of compressed desires

pressing the sky, re-animating us

Street Sweep

Exhume the dust for me

as you go by, a symmetric stormy monster,

a dinosaur adorned in flashing alien lights

yellowing out my bedroom window

as you sneak across the road in a roar

turning up the dirt, the street sweeper

O sure, everything is allowed at the service

of the oil age, automatic as the agonized sky,

a pusher man prone to the wheeled Brontosaurus,

clouding up the gassy metrics, a ton of dunes

ruining the atmosphere already

increasingly painful to breathe

Your weekend worship of the highways and byways,

the white salts and manicured molecules

spun up by tires and thrusts and egos

turning the corners hard, the insecurities

of motorized minds, tarnishing the trashy homes

with insiders hardly aware of the poisons

foisted upon the detritus of man,

blending with throat burns and sneezes,

the polychemical wheezes for a death dance

dialed up by the need for speed,

for time machines littering the pathways

running over the civic plan lands,

creating scars on kites, noxious fumes

for birds, sick on the way to the animal hospital,

the skies gone brown, gone to paste,

the karma kills of what comes around,

goes around

All typed up in Courier,

the ink is dry as the messenger

is hung from the brittle forest

of toilet paper and trees

The ax men came by this week

and cut the lone tree on the block down;

must have been more than an half-century old,

and this typewriter is my counterweight

Stiff in the wind, drying fast as central California,

the last water is water that won't last,

and the centrifuge of the rude work crew,

hooped and howled when they chopped it down

The undeclared war on nature, represented

in this microcosm of pointless foolishness

was at the service of the power company

and the shade is gone and my heart is numb

For war is peace for satiated kings and queens

selling us sweet drinks to suck down

or the big high five with unwashed hands,

the blood and guilt gone soft

as the lost daughters and sons

circle the dead branches, the stumps left over,

speechless and mute; the shade

lost and gone as the seizure winds

crossing the mountain ranges,

stirring up heat and dust ...

Soon, they'll be begging for the stuff

from shore to stormy shore

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