From the top of this windy wheatfield hill
Wrapped in my old coat against the chill
Comfortable in the white pickup from long use
While the radio drones news.
Down the toboggan run of Division Street
Past the finest house in town, now empty,
I motor on this wintry morning
Tires slip as I hang left onto Highway Two
No matter how careful on gas and wheel.
Old commercial buildings stand hollow-eyed
In spite of all their brick solidity
The stability of this place is now the stasis of
Hospital bed and graveyard.
A light shines in the old pharmacy
Now administering fantasy and caffeine
Sovereign remedies for modern ills
Grocery store, beauty parlor, license office
Bastions of the necessary, the desirable, the mandatory
All the rest stand empty – old pizza parlors, repair shops
Gone the hardware store, gone the diner
It takes a long time to get past this
Little half-deserted town
Full of the husks of big ideas
Desperately postponing the inevitable
As we all do, even as this poem does,
Not wanting ever to quite get to the sign
That directs us to Grand Coulee Dam
Not wanting to turn north at the sewage plant
Where once the horse racing brought people from all around
Where once a pleasant lake beguiled crazy bachelor
To build cabins, now collecting the shite of
Dam electricians and old people
Some halfwit booster built a
Dirtbike track and frisbeegolf course
Here at the edge of the sewage.
But who am I to deal in such impolite reckonings?
My own sins are much the same, relate me to
This place –
Never satisfied, always scanning the sagebrush horizon
For the promised line of cottonwood trees, feckless,
Never finishing what I start, given to
Wishful thinking, self important –
Nonetheless, I turn left
Climbing little hills, barely seeming hills,
Wheat stubble coming through the snow in
Corduroy patches like worn out pants
Holy old George Washington’s silhouette portrait
Reminds me to never tell a lie and to
Hang on to that dollar bill, our natural religion.
Through the freezing fog the
Boot tree looms
Giant cottonwood filled with shoes of
Long departed track teams,
Two ravens pick old bones
Ruined windmill, obsolete water-bringer.
A shadow is on my heart, we’ve reached
The crest of the hill, high water mark of giant floods
All downhill from here, past the two farmhouses
That never show signs of life, into the mouth of
The canyon, down through a gash in the rock
Black basalt worn like broken teeth
Dark fir tree incongruous after the open plain
Exiled here far from the sea, last of their kind
So the old lie says, that once thronged
A living river, still here they are
Carrying life and spreading seeds to the wind
In despite
Here in the cold canyon shade,
Here where the sun never shines
Here in the last refugium of life
As it has been
Springs of water from the rock
Chthonic caves along these sleeping
Rock walls, Amelanchier flowers,
Wild turkeys strutting by the cottonwood stream,
Shelter from the wind.
But now, finally, the moment I’ve been postponing
Desperately directing my mind to other things
Pale waters pool below me,
Concrete obscenity shining bright,
Drowned towns, watery graveyards, disappeared forests,
Mechanical victories, electrical sublime, eighth
Wonder of the world
(as the shit-heel small town lawyers had it)
Annihilator of dream time, bringer of onions and
Plutonium.
Lights glare on the pooled water
I pass ticky-tacky palaces of retired engineers
Waiting for death in the sand
and the sagebrush, graveyard conveniently at hand
A junkyard, a church no one attends,
Crumbling concrete block disaster
Broken down cars, more empty shops.
Sits-in-the-middle still sitting
Though the waters have filled
Rattlesnake Canyon, and the rock.
I try and remember, if I ever knew,
As I pull up to the guard shack to show
My picture,
What the hell was Coyote really after?
Author: Duncan MacNae
Exiled Gael, scion of the Dust Bowl, dweller within Divine Grace, admirer of mountains, I have made my peace with trout and the starlings. Looking for a river and healing trees.
duncanmacduncan5@gmail.com
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