HITCHIN DESERT BLACKTOP

HITCHIN DESERT BLACKTOP

for Salman


Someone is coming down the road, meaning you
and you know just how, kicking dust, flipping off cows.
Bootheels scrape and backpack. Nirvana tape played
over and over. Batteries spent and the last Greyhound left

Salome. Vacant cantina, where she danced, long-legged
girl with a glass eye. Wind chipping plaster, all blues become
the sky and bleach. Christmas cholla. Counting transistors.
They say sucking a pebble cuts the thirst.
You say they’re wrong.

Harold washes cat piss with his quarters. Not poetic,
he says. Never make a poem of The Road.
No my friend, you agree. Not nothin like the road.
Harold says linemen wear special boots,
high-topped calves, like loggers, laces down to the toe.
You promise, next time, you’ll look.

Another quarter, another story from a man in dungarees,
whipcord, and sun-burned arms. And you ask of scars,
knowing what you know of collecting stories, salt, and he
says real slow, like you’re the biggest dumb-ass set foot off a highway:
linemen don’t have scars—not the ones still living.

Neon motel signs of palm trees once lit 1952 oasis here,
old Mexican trails of trade between the Harquahala and Harcuvar,
now it’s a laundromat with five working dryers, one washer.
Who ever heard of such a thing in Arizona, says Harold.
Dryers in Arizona. Who ever heard?

Says he don’t find the strays, they find him.
Cats, you ask. Yeah, he says, that’s right.
Try to get a ride from here, even the swimming pools
open and cracked, sleep siestas.
Noon is nowhere in Arizona.

But come night seek headlights again, rattling
pickup with a Navajo and his nephew.
Man says: If you can get him to talk, good luck,
and let me know. I can’t.


The man wears a straw cowboy hat, turquoise
earrings, denim jacket stitched with blanket lining,
warm for morning chores, long night drives, Diné.
Says he has horses, says he has sheep, Diné.
Got his education at Princeton now back, teaching
at community college, Diné.
The nephew stares at you, obsidian eyes, Diné.

Brakemen and Bix Beiderbecke. Long lonesome
and bald tires. Pintos and bays, sorrels and dun.
If you say the names of the desert it’s a letter
you type, old Smith-Corona chatter and click clack
of the Santa Fe.

Winter and the Yeibicheii dance, boxcars moan.
Moonset on mesas and coyotes call out black
between stars that arc over Shiprock. Tsé but’a’í,
mother who brought the people here on her back.
She sleeps. Wing of a bird once flown.

The tired of this West comes forward
and wraps you. The nephew holds his quiet—
carries corn pollen, knows the way, Diné.
Five times brings the balance.
Blacktop means roads and desert both.