Dry as scripture the bed of Owens Lake glistens

in November sun like crusted blood.

The air is gritty with broken promises.

I've made this trip a hundred times, never

in an empty season after summer, before snow.

Roadhouses where I wasted my youth trying

to get lucky have vanished,

along with the ribs of steamers that freighted

Cerro Gordo silver to Olancha, bringing back

cheap whores and expensive lumber.

On this trip I resolve to do things

I've never done before.

Watch the Leonid meteor shower from

Kearsarge Peak above Onion Valley.

Visit a graveyard

in the shadow of Temple Crag.

Talk to the bristlecone pines

on Methuselah Trail

and learn how to survive in hopeless soil.

I know I won't get lucky.

My luck ran away in hospital slippers.

Tonight in the town where Mary Austin

wrote The Land of Little Rain

I'm the only guest in the only hotel.

My room fills with ghosts.

Most of them followed me here.

I open a window to

the cold night air, to voices

crying out about the terrible things

we do in the name of love.

I try to answer but no one listens.

Early in the Christian Era

one of the Desert Fathers explained

that he went into the wilderness

not to find God but to be found.

God

or anyone out there

it's lonely

as a tomb in here

and I'm going down in flames.

Find me now. Find me now. 

      

     

the cut of my pecker and my wife.

Half my bloodline tended the ovens where

your people turned to fertilizer.

I never wrestled cheek to jowl

with the angel Akriel.

I seldom get heartburn or constipation.

But listen! when the scroll of your breath

opens to a poem, when your words

rain down like manna I become

kosher, Orthodox, Hasidic.

Hirschman says all poets are Jewish

or all Jews are poets

I forget which

and yes Bill, this infidel, this goy,

this hooligan in your land of candles

and wine trembles like the walls of Jericho

when you say "Better earth as a brown fist

at my throat than a soft bite of worms,"

or "Can one truly sing

without this terrible knowledge?"

Bill, what blood cannot do for me

Your words have done.

Shalom, Pillin. Hals und Beinbruch! 

     

     

sunlight louder than bad shitkicker jazz,

nights dull enough to base a sermon on.

In Blanche's Bar & Grill propeller fans

and glass after clammy glass of beer

check-dam the Panamint Valley heat,

rising like a flood outside. The only whore

in town wears store teeth and a railroad watch.

Suppose you holed up here, on the run,

and running out of luck. You couldn't leave.

You'd arrive in a lather, boiling across

a range where wind still works the claims

that miners flattened their hopes on.

You'd settle down with your thirst.

Pickled in sweat skinned by the sun

and hung out to dry you'd last a lifetime.

Dick, history's wrong

Custer never quit,

he's here behind a bar trading salvos with Dakotas.

Death and failure take forever here,

and time means nothing to the sun, the wind.