Edict Against Phoenix
Posted by Anaxagoras [ jjasmin AT cableone DOT net ]; on February 28, 2006 at 17:36:31:
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires; and there I shaped
The city’s ancient legend into this . . .
—Tennyson
It’s wise to cross the desert at night.
On the long Mojave highway
the stars guide mapless travelers.
There are no sounds of distraction,
only the wind and the metronomic click
of tires on the road.
The radio may capture a cello or bassoons
allegro ma poco mi Vivaldi in emerald theater
of dashboard lamps. But desert sounds
are better. It’s at last not a question
of semantics, but syntax. In the city
they say: the policemen must stop
drinking after midnight. Knotted languages can be
unraveled in the desert, this place
where even good and evil contend
with weapons made of words.
In the city, whiffs of stale air from urinals,
bars, and gas stations mix with perfume
in the streets. Ten thousand guitars strain
to deliver a secret tone, while eyes deluded by flat
beer and Benzedrine look out beyond the red
hypnotic needles of radio towers, past cops jailed
for another night in cruisers,
haunting streets that wind out
beyond the inhuman neon to the desert’s
aphonic solitude.
The women of the city understand starving men;
they ride without a stitch, à cheval
through town. Their ultimatums were issued
long ago. They’re destined for shallow roots, spiny
hides, an occasional flower, and deep, watery canals.
These sum up the balance of their advantage
in an odd landscape where
monstrous abstracts creep toward the dunes.
Cubes and cones smash twilight;
black geometries close the stars’ debut with grids
of queasy light. Near the perimeter, clumps of houses
become yucca, and all the magnitude of steel and glass
slopes up, turns away to drain into the fixed juris-
diction of the sky. The last fence splits, parted lips
articulate the speech of sand, rock, snake, and cloud.
Heat dances the ghost-dance. The city returns
to its intended state: mirage.
To make a lineage of this is not to say
the dog bow-wows. The jackal and wolf
howl, Babylon surrenders its gardens to sand
and its walls to the mercy of the wind. No man
finds a true reflection of his image in the city.
His face appears most clear in oasis water,
framed in sky. The desert is an archive
preserved for tracing lines.
Down south in Nogales the women never change.
They don’t need magic–they know good houses
are made of earth and water, dried in wind.
The ruins become dust again, the clouds are mountains,
air is blue by day and loans its hue to sand by night.
El cielo sí es un espejo terrible.
Life in the city lends itself to gibberish
as a cello lends itself to sad refrains.
The Hopi conjugate their tales of years
in sheaves of song or petroglyphs chiseled in red stone,
no bargains made with wives or queens–
no ancestral city-boys out on the Res.
Nightfall on Black Mesa is full of gurglings.
Big saguaro, old woman of thorns and flowers
empties her wet fetus on the ground. Her head
crowned with the quadrant of Orion, her arms
full of pale blooms, she relinquishes her son,
her only son to isolation, pipe-notes and leather
smells, silver and onyx, soliloquy. I will teach you
to read the awful palimpsest of the sky:
crawl with gila, walk with bear, go on three legs
with ironwood.
But the city lures him with its curse,
steals his blessing with riddles and feasts.
The father of a rustic tribe in skins of beasts,
he drinks and drinks to sweet forgetfulness,
pisses his pants in a holding cell (nobility
of the Painted Desert, sole beneficiary
of the intestate Maya and Aztec) he sleeps it off
on the concrete floor. Only then, in that place,
when he hears nothing, sees nothing, does the cockroach
scuttle to his ear and whisper: I will tell you
the mystery of survival: Desert sounds are better.