The Road (selections)
Castaways
Rusting in the ragweed, the futile, fertile hubs
flung like flowerpots around it,
a car carcass rides with its twin castaways,
entranced in the exploded springs.
They watch, hushed, the long uncanny caravan,
and hear its resonant drone recede,
as bright, more than mechanical, it mounts
along the turning, climbing, visionary groove,
while daisy-starred, the dark,
around unrescuable eyes, scours the twisted frame.
Gas
Dry decaying hoses
Lie amid wild roses
Around the rusting dump.
An enigmatic dial
Registers with a smile
Those prices on the pump.
Like a prehistorical
Snake-infested oracle
The island stands today.
The concrete, tainted with oil
And dead attendants' toil,
Keeps the weeds at bay.
We cannot hear the bell
Ring up the cost and tell
How many miles we've driven.
Here out in the cold
There's nothing to be sold,
And no directions given.
Intruders
Straighter than the Roman Road,
With its imperious modern air
Runs the divided throughfare.
The grassy median, newly mowed,
Is bare of any legionnaire.
The haulers push on with their load,
And in the distance disappear.
A placid power seems to steer
Each citizen's mobile abode,
Where none hears what the others hear.
But shattering their pleasant code,
Above the drone they hear a cheer;
Blown beards beside the windows leer:
Horned helmets, chains, lewd patches sewed
To greasy leather, they are here.
A car swerves as the leaders goad
Their roaring mounts to cross too near,
And screaming off in higher gear,
They leave a trail of traffic slowed,
Scared faces, windshields splashed with beer.
Motel
Rain streaks a burro made of plaster,
And falls from the sombrero of his master.
The red roof-tile and cactus mimic
A sleepy town south of the border.
What in its day was tawdry gimmick
Gleams like the relics of a fading order.
For his dry fantasy the owner
Inherited the loser and the loner:
Road salesmen who, like ancient traders,
Sailed into any port they saw,
Victims of leaky radiators,
And many on the wrong side of the law.
But now, abandoned to the rains,
A luster to his enterprise remains,
More than the coin it paid him in.
The dust of his imagination
Has run to mud; its fruits begin
To brighten towards that sunny destination.
Prairie
Nosed like boats against a railing
Washed in waves of waist-high grass,
The cars stand idle. In the failing
Afternoon, truck shadows pass
Along the shoals of that bright sea.
Rapt figures wield binoculars:
In those old depths where nothing stirs,
What do these vision-fishers see?
A shout: the naked eye descries
Five pronghorns bounding dolphin-like,
While cars atop the asphalt dike
Wait patiently with bulging eyes.
Oil
Haze on the hillside, early and late,
Where iron lobes reciprocate,
And industry, for all it's worth,
Battens on this limb of earth.
By slender probe and bobbing head
The ancient veins are pricked and bled,
So that the tribe can multiply
Its clockwork dance against the sky.
Haze on the hillside, over the fields
Where morning knows what evening yields:
A smarting eye, a blood-red sun;
The hours drained empty, one by one.
Stations of the Night
The distant neon slowly scrolls
The colors of another city,
And to the singer's doo-wah-diddy,
The traffic, lit like river boats,
Along the darkened asphalt rolls.
No break now from those tinpan notes
Until the paying of the tolls.
The city's gone, and in a while
A raindrop on the windshield shivers.
Now falling stocks and rising rivers
Invade the beat of untuned waves.
The spirit's numb; for many a mile,
No longer knowing what it craves,
No hand comes forth to touch the dial.
"Reach out...one-forty...scattered showers..."
The speaker stutters in confusion.
"And happiness is just an illusion..."
No longer knowing word from song,
The voices blur into the hours,
While into the weary circuits throng
The signals of more distant towers.
The Babel of their crackling choirs
Topples to a voice that rails at sin,
And as its gospel, homing in,
Extolls His Everlasting Love,
A devilish breathless accent fires
Its disembodied chant above
The somnolence of humming tires.
But soon the raucous preacher fades
Into the ethereal congregation,
Where none now holds the clearer station,
But all by all are electrified.
Inscrutable, the spirit trades
Its high-beam with the souls inside
The double-starred and drifting shades.
Parts
Through greasy miles of cinder blocks
That flank the road and, box by box,
Unpack its weird anatomy,
Sail shades of mufflers, brakes and shocks.
A billboard piston on the fly
With neon spark plug flashes by.
Chasing its lost rim, maybe,
A giant tire rolls through the sky.
Like illustrated magic runes,
Bizarrely captioned bold cartoons
Dissect the fruits of industry
Under the streetlights' amber moons.
Whereby the ever-literal heart
Construes a world so blown apart,
Not even the heaviest battery
Can make the silent engine start.
And multiply them ten times ten,
Not all the horsepower or men
In fired-up forge or factory
Can make the bruised core sound again.
The Eagles of Oraibi
[Envisioned as the final poem in the "Road" cycle, this was
written shortly after The Ghost Dancers; like that work, it
combines a Greek form with an American Indian subject. The form
is that of the Pindaric ode, understood as a choral dance poem,
not the purely literary type employed by Cowley and others.
Pindar was not only one of the greatest poets, but quite possibly
the greatest "composer" in ancient Greece, though it's hard to
say for sure, since no musical "scores" survive. His meters,
though, are of a subtlety unmatched even by the choral odes of
the Athenian dramatists. The Eagles of Oraibi employs his triadic
structure: all stanzas are metrically identically, except for
every third one, which is in a variant pattern, the same
throughout.
The performance scenario, so far as I have worked it out, is
as follows: a chorus sings the poem, standing in a large
semicircle around two masked dancers representing the eagles.
Peripheral figures, also dancers, may enter from time to time.
The chorus itself is stationary, though hand gestures and other
movements may be choreographed.
Old Oraibi is a Hopi village in northern Arizona, billed
in the tourist guides as "the oldest continuously inhabited town
in the U.S." When I visited it many years ago, there were two
golden eagles tethered atop a house at the very edge of the mesa.
I later read about the ceremonial use of eagles among the Hopi.]
Golden gnarled heads half-nodding, rough-skinned
talons clasped to the prisoning perch,
over the chasm's arid drowse,
juniper-laden in a dream of dust,
the warrior pair serenely peer,
showing incarnate still
in the stillness of golden curves
a force that knows no vertigo.
Tribal thongs long have yearly bound them
here, where edge of the village meets air.
Visible strays, as legend goes,
powers sojourning in a bright declension,
fledgling caught, rooftop they blaze,
biding the burning solstices.
Priests with their hard skilled thumbs
and prayers then gently strangle them;
mightily released, fluttering alive
and unwinged into dream-dark regions of power,
as home-come siblings, unmindful
of seasonal being thenceforth they dwell.
But the bright unspirited carcasses,
plucked for the prime rites, crops or war,
yield priestly plumes gold-tinged in round;
white down for the common man's prayer sticks.
Password-like, these mind powers of seasons,
bright shapes borne in the suffering world,
tokening old releasers' prayers.
Summers out of mind it was so.
But now as keepsakes these two doze alone.
Fear of law, these late years,
or forgetfulness, holds the priest's
hard-pressed gift from gold-feathered throats.
Burnished shapes dust the sagebrush hourly,
straying down from the high-powered road.
Loitering feet rouse barking peals,
scurries from the shadows of adobe.
Rusted wrecks roost fowl; faint household
sounds, querulous, Asiatic,
echo at the chasm's edge. The glass eyes
click. Pots bang. They depart.
Shimmering and vast visions of aridity
swim to the gold thralls' effortless sight.
Minute ore-carriers, groaning astraddle
their burden, heave to light petrified
lees of a fern-garden, monster-trodden anew,
while brandished off where brazen
dust clouds hang in growing
billows over testing grounds,
giant claws mine the marred horizon.
Snaked earth, crow-spotted through the sun-leagues,
coils in their fierce emphatic eyes,
cleansed by the flicker of the lids' nictation.
Bright existence makes them tired.
Stretching like sun-vexed passengers,
idly, each tucks a talon's fist
in golden underdown.
Dark's first breeze, canyon-bred, balloons
the bleached man-shapes, spirited and fast
dispirited again, that ring their roost.
Elevated, purpled by the frantic sun,
the far rim grows a thundrous crest.
Phosphorous eyes light depths of adobe.
The cagelike hum of metal reeds
choirs other worlds.
Suddenly awake, startled at the arc
of a sun-stolen splendor, hurling up high
and hornlike from the crest,
with glimmering and journey-weary eyes,
the warriors, tranced to the march
of the worldwide ravishing darkness,
watch the glowing fusile shape that climbs it,
unwinged, homing, to the verge of sight.