Читать книгу Selfi americano - Curtis Bauer - Страница 9

Maybe I should praise the mapped green

vast where the road I follow disappears

and the GPS triangle that is me begins

to twirl as if I’m not the only one confused

but then follows me into the expanse

in front of the car, in front of the declining sun

that in four hours more or less will glint the humping pump jacks

some oil shade of rusted, and I hope to be gone by then,

to have found some paved road I have never reached

down to touch but will to thank it and whisper thank you

like some hostage newly freed and returned to her country

kissed the tarmac in front of cameras before the neck

of her wife or cheek of her father or saluted

some officer obliged to welcome her home,

or I would better show my gratitude today by pulling

down the six coyote carcasses lining the property fence

I shouldn’t have entered thinking it was a new way home,

past the gravel pit where kids from Ralls must come to drink

and fuck maybe their older cousins to escape their marriages

or to shoot cans or the sky and someone got so piss-drunk

he took off that pair of green denim jeans perfect

on the rack at Sears and less so each minute, out here

on a road without a name, a path really, and left them crumpled

on the crumpled dirt, the only green in this sea, this sea of red

earth a few still think what they do is farm

and therefore spend their money and hours

disking back and forth across the fields

like boats trawling the Salton Sea or

an astronaut on Mars who lost a special tool

in what wouldn’t be called a field but something else

interstellar and spatial like terra vasta and this

is Texas so that might work

because the ground is vast and about

to blow around your face and

I haven’t killed anything

with four legs and fur in years

though last night I misstepped again

and my friend the salamander

who clung to the wall near the kitchen

and watched me pass every day since July

jumped beneath a shoe and stayed

kissing the floor, as if euphoric,

having finally been released from the wall,

and I buried him in the trash heap I call compost

and I should drive back east to find those carcasses

now bristling in the evening wind and help them back

to that euphoric ground which adored them

and kissed each of their trotting feet.