This is Not a Blog Post

This is a poem (or something like a poem).

jornada del muerto

i.

level land of lava.
one hundred miles long.
dead sea, black rock,
white sand, sunlight, dust.

hollow echo of silence snows
on plains where nothing lives.
windlessness blows in. clouds
rip over the Sierra Oscura. dark

mountains erode in the heat
into dust, sky. the elements
of fallout melt in the ground.
sand fuses to shiny green glass,

dust becomes something new
in the instant of shadowless clarity.
brighter than noon, false dawn
pours from a sun chained to Earth,

years later still yet to set in the dust.

ii.

All my friends are scientists discovering things making drugs creating knowledge chasing snakes doing whatever scientists do to become esteemed and distinguished indispensable contributors and members in good standing of our progressive and rational Enlightenment culture and here I am pretending to watch a historical event from a crow’s nest sixty years in the future with a group of men who are not themselves but themselves as portrayed by various Hollywood actors most of whom are dead or crazy and I have decided to call this work. We get up before dawn and it is cold in July on the desert and still black. I am in a Jeep which is a new thing at this point and next to me in the back is a tall skinny Tony Perkins looking like he has been attending a wake for the entire cast of The Sound of Music for the last six months, having uncomfortably folded his long limbs into the not-quite-functional backseat of this vehicle, and he rocks back and forth muttering what could be prayers in a very ancient language and stares straight and hard into the blankness through which we are driving. I can’t see a thing. Nobody else in the truck knows Tony Perkins is gay. George C. Scott is behind the wheel singing La Marseillaise over and over in quite mellifluous French. The radio blurts some loud static then leaves a slippery vibration in the following silence. I hum the first verse of America the Beautiful but I have trouble picturing a spot right now where anything grows. Elizabeth Taylor wears warpaint and a feather in her hair in the passenger seat. She periodically shrieks and flutters her hand over her mouth, telling us she is Pueblo and hunting Spanish Conquistadores who have been observed in the area chasing around a German fugitive on the orders of the Inquisition. She has seen them circling each other on the plains and I ask who is the Road Runner and who Wile E. Coyote but it is like I have not said anything at all. I feel we have been driving for decades maybe more. The road, really more of a rutted track, runs on in a line measured by hand with a ruler directly through the Arc de Triomphe of the mathematical imagination into the wastelandscape home of the Roman god Mars. I ask myself what I am doing here. George C. Scott glances at me in the rear view and seems to be asking the same thing. We arrive, disembark at a low windowless structure and it occurs to me there’s no need for a roof since it last rained in this place a thousand years ago. I take the dark goggles I am offered and try them on. Their tint is absolute. I don’t notice for maybe ten minutes that no one is speaking. Nothing moves. We are given warning and a countdown that feels like drowning. It looks like nothing so much as the moon, blooming from a field of cauliflower, rising out of the desert with the gravity of an old farmer confronting the winter. It looks like nothing so much as a golf ball, submerged partly in sand of a fairway bunker, awaiting in the shushed importance of a major event the player’s swing to send it arced in parabolic grace through the invisible black beyond. It looks like nothing so much as a perfect sphere of marble, mined and shaped by Michelangelo, coated by Leonardo with a stain of his own invention that reflects the sum total of all light sent bouncing around space since time began. It looks like nothing so much as a pupilless eye, born in the colors contorting through phases of rainbow, violet blue green red and crystalline white streaming out in writhing and sexual rays from which it is now and forever impossible to hide. All my friends are scientists and they stand around doodling in notebooks, drawing their coworkers naked, and they contribute these findings to journals in a language that no longer exists. It occurs to me we are present at the conception of an abstract historical era in the middle of an actual desert, and I wonder which is the more real. I am not breathing. I kneel in the sand and drag my finger through the dirt but forget how to spell the word earth while an angry general who looks exactly like Paul Newman chomps his jaws around a corncob pipe and through perfect teeth and what look like painfully distended neck tendons shouts something inaudible at the top of his lungs into the onrushing alien wind.

iii.

lightburst.
scrubbrush feverburns.
shadowtree flashfreezes
outline onto zeroground.
sandgardenblooms.
budfruit stillbirth.
lavaflow. mountaintime.
wildbluesky. horizonbowl.
land. wind. ash.
glass. steel. heat.
Trinity.