River Elegy
A gnarled cottonwood stands sentry
at the head of Dirty Devil ravine.
It's huddled brethren, slightly healthier,
cling close to the pathetic creek,
an earth-toned trickle skipping
through sandstone toward Glen Canyon
and the captured Colorado.
The maps call it Lake Powell now,
ill-fitting tribute to Major John Wesley,
or anyone who could love this barren land
that offers comfort only in solitude.
The mighty force that dug the Grand Canyon,
reduced to a playground, flattened
out and blanded to a sickly green,
has been wiped from the red face of the Southwest.
No drop will reach the ocean, diverted
to spew from plastic rattlesnakes, sunning
on incongruous green patches in suburbs
from Los Angeles to Phoenix.
Heaven's river, holy and enchanted,
has only ashes in its mouth.
No molecule scraped from Utah's sandy cliffs
completes the long slide to the Sea of Cortes,
where a mother oyster waits, and Steinbeck's
divers mill about, smoking and drinking tequila.
Instead the lake stagnates; the silt descends,
slowly choking the drowned cottonwoods
that had offered their meager shade to Powell's camps.
Branches still stretch from their muddy deathbed,
reaching for sun they'll never know again.
Home, To Picher, Oklahoma
Home,
to Picher, Oklahoma
Grandma Connell, whose tears
soaked a new beret at Fort Benning,
lived at Central and Cherokee with four cats
in a pistachio-painted A-frame house.
He saw her yesterday at a nursing home in Tulsa,
but the house and the cats, and Grandpa’s
hand-carved cherry table where Tollie
taught him chess and bridge while
three older brothers toiled in the lead mine
that sentenced this town to death, long
before the tornado carried out the execution--
they’re all gone.
The prairie wind scrubs at the ruins
with metallic dust
’til the air looks and smells like Fallujah
right before the Marines went in.
His unit followed them, patrolling day
after day on a street like this, but there
sweat was poured into renewal.
In Picher, even cleaning up is futile.
Learn to be Mediocre
A lot of people, perhaps especially people who spend their lives in small towns, have a somewhat distorted view of the world. This is probably true in a lot of ways, but the sense in which I mean it is that people believe that the best they’ve seen of something is among the best there is. Everyone thinks the best cook they know could be a world class chef, or the best player on their church softball team could have made the majors with a couple of breaks. There’s somebody singing in your church choir or neighborhood karaoke bar just waiting to be discovered and record number one hits. Your girlfriend’s poetry should be anthologized with Tennyson or Plath.
For the most part, everyone is wrong. The range of expertise or skill within your own personal experience almost never reflects the entire range of humanity. Most people never meet someone that is really world-class at anything, and that’s fine. There are lots of levels of “really good” that enrich people’s lives. The lady that runs the Panther Drive-In, Angie Campbell, almost certainly couldn’t be Julia Child even if given the opportunity, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t make the best Denver omelet I’ve ever tasted. I’m content with it being the best one I ever will taste. The fact that there’s someone out there who could make a better one, or make something that made me forget Denver omelets ever existed, simply isn’t relevant to my life.