Press, don’t watch the fall
Of gypsum, pot ash, basalt over top, coal, oil,
Roads curved as bridge tarmac engineered to bend.

False starts and ricochets,
All tumbling down the avalanche of sense
With bits and pieces of the Western hill,
The gratuitous violence of living in the arroyos,
Spending time in the red rock sun like an oven.
Bent over as the wagon wheel released from its axel,
Grass coming through its chipped spars and spokes.

Old oil and gas operations smeared,
Gouged by failures of foreign currencies and domestic wrangling.
Bug up the land’s value and
The severed pump head is a one arm, a paleosaur
With dentures made of chain link and mail.
She has swords for toenails now in need of paint,
Half buried, taking umbrage at the top soil and weeds
That blow in the mouth of its soul.

Her soul,
Purple as a bruised queen at morning ablutions
Tucking her manhood away for the day.
Tucking the dike with plaster and concrete
To hold back water if there were anything to hold.

We are poorer now, resentful,
Half caught up in the mosquito nets and hammock chords of comfort,
Now distant and wailing like whales.
Birds at sea skimming breakers in a stiff wind
Like a shot drink in a glass on the wood of a dusky bar.
There are places, cellars, floors, eroded basement levees
Where cob webs and fine grey powders can get in your lungs like radon,
Like calcite, granite dust, asbestos, just ask us and kill you.

Dead as an Indian grave,
Toppled Kiva, broken sun.
Where the channels take the waters now is hard to say.
It’s a legal matter, clear as money
After the apocalypse, cleaning up.
Nobody has any.
Nobody knows one.

Everyone still birthed what they had left,
Out of excess of caution,
Habitual over estimation of reserve and manners,
Of a better way to treat each other.
Stop the asking after the broken pipes of flea market barter,
After ground breaking and worker housing.
After concentration, now free to rest.
Baby at her breast.
Free to talk.
Long shot at the fence going up to make the grab.
Beer all around the bar foaming in glasses like a party.
Foam in the river brown as skin sun leather and
Hats and backs bent over the dry field’s irrigation rows,
The pesticide wash ups,
Drive throughs now cat cautious as a cop.

Over the number of a gun,
Poor as the girl,
Sleepy as the cow,
The metal grill on the floor,
The slaughter requires 24 hours of no eating.

The center of all towns ritually purged of the color orange.
Only tawny and tortoise shell, camouflaged cats remain,
Confused by the tail of shadows going down with the rushing water,
With her drain all canked with stems and trash
From the last gulley washer that cleaved Nevada.

We are far from clean now.
Call it a holiday but filth finds its crevice,
A way into the body politic black as pitch and tar.
The pits and the roads where vested workers breathe the fumes.
There is never enough water and then there is a flood.

Can you breathe?
Can you see me and the others,
Can you see?
She believes the time will come,
Woolen and woven as a tapestry of extents, vistas, limits.
When the rapture captures
And the smoky constituents settle back in the hill,
Gypsum, pot ash,
Basalt plateau hard as glass
And the tracks and the Spring,
The arroyo collapsed with us and its walls
Seeming to fill in but opening out,
downstream like a canyon.

Solitary mistakes,
Collective guilt.
The blood of the goat
And tile floor,
The brandished blades and beating heart,
The sacrifice of common place
Tracked up his arm
Like a junkie in a corner waiting
As the rest to take effect.