Santa Fe, Her Afghan Night
Light hesitates to fix, to position itself
between night’s huge twin mammaries
spewing their milk across our universe
and crusts and ridges of our desert roads.
Halogen lamps housed under cars: our
mices love to nest inside these yes-you-
vees. Light spatters land because the city,
ignoring where it stops and starts, has
spread unnumbered blocks since a first
visit—but its parameters continue lawless.
From air, city can never promise grid or
pattern. Paternalistic copters wink in the
quiet, their blades split wooden lightning
followed by some belated thunder. Did
I walk up to the P.O. today to see stars
flying among stripes, make sure we’re
sure in a familiar country? Facing some
faces from another desert in some broke,
or else mortal, East—a film!—brought
understanding “no fear” no longer holds:
we must haul ass, get out, get “home” if
can be, sand to sand, bury our insolence.
So many dead in previous scrums, sons of
poor Nuevomex! Vaterland falters! Never-
theless, it is not reading this—so please
bewilder it. At “Cowgirl Bar,” downtown,
company riots in various kitsch modes they
dance their hearts out to. Our rest of town lies
sleeping, hours previous any other. It dreams
does it? O Liberal it thinks itself in the dead
language passes for language now: the wish
to a good day, a wonderful, a maravillious
day. Prior to sleep, please plot a great com-
bustion. In a sweet dream pick presidential
rats, the stark rat-race obscenity, root of the
whole insane disaster, rot of the loving land,
plant them in ordure, recycled garbage. Throw
hands jointly between boss rear-legs, palm to
perineum, lift up the old morass, pitch it to fire.
