UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN MACKER
Indian Summer Autumn as much a notion as it is warm day, handwritten red crayon moon above the canyon in slow motion, a crisp yellow leaf afloat in its singularity flows down a shadowed stream into the Roaring Fork is peace Miles Davis, kind of blue & low a love potion alone on my old turntable is peace as peace is inevitably the wild practice of listening/ to a tribe of dry leaves or waters reflecting currents of transparent sunlight, or a raven’s wing beat the allure of pure high country this time of year, the practice of the season’s shortening days more languor than furor; thinking of war I can’t help but think of immutable total peace yet some day’s farther from war’s cure than cancer- it’s going to take more than a sorcerer, more than four horsemen, where common ground isn’t killing ground it’ll take more than simple necromancers or incantations & there will be some sort of solace for the torturers, a place of ballast they can go, a river & above the river trees where they can shed themselves of such practices that keep them in the furor of a common darkness away from this morning’s October light. Ghosting Sonora across this feral gunscape, in the shadow of the desert bestiaries, the murky, ominous autumn calm of the red rock necropolis, in the blue darkness of the ragged hondos, “a caked depopulated hell” the stutterer, Juh, Chief of the Chiricahua romps, beat, no born to kill tattoos on his forearm, has a tribe of bitter deaths to bury. Sires three boy warriors & one hundred twenty years later Guantanamo Bay is run by the same scalphunters now pursuing him across the grim outback. He never had to pray to Priapus for the endurance to defend his people or confront this American war with more war- cohort of Mangas & fire lord Cochise, he lost the Mexican army in the fog. As open a prayer as pure space was there was still room for extinction, the more he lost the more he took it underground, didn’t have the mojo for lasting opposition to yankee ordnance but he covered the desert like hoarfrost. Tonight, I salute the old chief with my Cormac McCarthy existentialist long road whisky neat & James McMurtry is singing Too Long In The Wasteland; one November he fell off his Spanish pony into the river & drowned, with his last breath moon rise is provoked over a red Mexican dusk, his taut shadow burns the bloody myth of itself onto the cold earth. |
© 2007 Underground Voices |
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