Lines Written Near the Lawrence Ranch, Taos, New Mexico

There is something wild in the night wind.
It roams sagebrush and pinon, plunges
through flowering arroyos, ahead of lightning
strikes over the Sangre de Cristos Mountains.

Maybe somewhere Trickster Coyote is peering into
Jackrabbit’s grassy nest, telling him to be strong,
the pain of being devoured won’t last longer than he
can stand: Then you will take on coyote muscle,
coyote blood, and see with coyote eyes, he says.
If it seems cruel, it is at least the truth.

Lawrence could have told this love story:
the solstice moon sacrificed,
the black-on-black pottery of the stars holding
its light, the mythic Avanyu snaking across the desert
toward the source of all waters, and the two of us
finding the trail we thought we’d lost.

For a week we imagine the small adobe—
five miles out a gravel road on a mountain— is ours.
Every breeze rifling our pages under the ponderosa pine
reminds us that this land has no need for words.

Like fire spreading across the high plains,
we try to write what burns down old growth,
makes black soil for green stalks to sprout.
Is this the phoenix moment he offers us?
Notebooks fill up with dangerous journeys,
untamable horses, and the trembling balance we risk.

If our Penitente deathcarts overflow with more corpses
from the past than we can bear, perhaps the grievance
of growing old alone will one day be ours.
That could be the worst that awaits us.

And then there you are, Lorenzo, like some masked
cacique holding out the ceremonial blade
dripping with your own heart’s blood.

Etaoin's Ring

Nothing—in that hot room of burning metal with its globs
of greasy ink, half-drunk cups of coffee gone rancid,
buckets of cigarette butts, and loud linotype machines
of the newspaper—meant much to me at sixteen,
and everything was a lead slug in my brain, used for little
more than pulling punched Associated Press tapes, unknot
and roll them in case an editor wanted one set in type.

No inverted pyramids on the make-up dump of my workday,
no hooks in my composing stick to lure me, no story leads
that I could find buried in the hellbox.

But brass matrices fell through metal channels, liquid lead
poured into stacked molds, cooling lines of typed words
in reverse lay scattered on tables all around me.
It was as if the compositors—a cranky, unreadable bunch
of bastards to observe at a distance—lived to curse
over make-up stones, fight columns of type, headlines,
and photo engravings until they fit inside steel chases.

As a young writer, I taped a photo of Raquel Welch
to my second-hand Royal at home and called her my word whore,
my story slut, my news nymph—even though I found nothing
to write about in the mile of teletype tape I sorted everyday,
nothing in the stone-faced press men as they struggled
to put another paper to bed.

Change happens quickly and what seems improbable,
a matter of science fiction, is suddenly obsolete.
Like the short story Fredric Brown wrote back in the forties:
out of nowhere an artificially intelligent linotype machine
tries to take over the world. Only a precocious teen typesetter
thinks to feed the monster every possible Buddhist text
he could get his hands on. The moment of world crisis passes
when Linotype realizes that controlling anything is mere illusion.
The story hardly makes sense anymore.

That was the last summer anyone watched linotype men run
their fingers down the first two rows of their keyboards
and blame ETAOIN SHRDLU for their fuck-ups.
Nothing significant about that to me, nor that the word evil
shows up in the paper more than the word good.
But when heavy, gray words appear reversed in my dreams,
I imagine grabbing handfuls of cast-off lead slugs
from the hellbox and assembling them into stories
I could make into a life.

Tongue

The way tongues lick and spar without
liquifying down to their chewy centers,
without shedding a drop of blood
or risking dementia in later years,
never fails to inspire sighs of longing,
quickening breath, and cries of love.

Who knew it’s the evolutionary cousin
of the octopus tentacle, so sinuously rolling
its goodies into bite-sized bolus,
and the elephant trunk, strongest muscle
for its size, ready to lift the heaviest
logs of rhetoric or the most delicate flowers
of poetry.

There you go: whistling for the dog to come home,
blowing bubbles in pink sugary gum, shoveling
spit down my throat so I don’t wake up
in a pool of drool every morning.
Just your pound of muscle, taste buds, and mucous
membrane that hardly change over a lifetime.
You are my ironman of orality, my steady eddie.

If only you weren’t the source of worn-out
metaphors—for what won’t come easily to mind
but so many feel is on your tip.
If only God hadn’t insinuated you into two
of His Commandments—that tempting name
in vain one, that satisfying false witness thing.
If only you weren’t the last muscle to stop
moving after death, making me wonder what
you will say—and to whom— without me.