Draft #3: getting a *little*closer

July Never Seemed So Strange

The doors whump shut
This car a sleek spoon dipping the dust bowl
Like the star metal of a broken constellation
Nothing new here
Black tire lizards skid and lie
The full moon only a thumb pressed through dark tissue
I should eat off the edge of a stick, one hand
Trailing in cloud and stream by the still road
Something else I can’t come close to

This desert belongs to someone
Farmers at night invent sea stories
Till fins from the earth’s backbone
Their cloud-carried messages
Burn like ancient fires to a fork of ash
Who digs in the ground only to look at heaps?

Americana out here flaking decay is no more
than a prom queen in her tattered silk
Purple cab, no-gut canopy, rusted hood
The head of a swollen traveler beside a sleeping elephant
Stone flank, furred shoulders

The queen’s sudden glory rubbed out by sun
Makeup smeared and cake-eyed she dreams
The ground runs up beside her
Overflowing its banks like rivers of grimy fish

In the city of water my hands drowned
My body rose
Bird, take my eye : I would take your wings

The Chacans gone still pilgrims linger
Americana, even hate you squander
All that is judged, all who meanly judge
Waste you pin to the obelisk

Without this bone-stink it would be hard to find myself
This is not my monument
That branch I mistook for a bird
Would be lovelier as a bird