Читать книгу Phases - Mischa Willett - Страница 15

A type of desert pine, Chaparral

is also the street where I was born,

which has on it, sure enough, three Chaparral

pines. This is in Scottsdale, so called

because the largest ranch in these here parts,

in the parlance of the locals, belonged to one

Winifred Scott, of whom there are no

fewer than four bronze statues in the town

that bears his name. His major accomplishment

was owning the land later developers rendered town.

Of the “dale,” none can account.

“Scottsbluff” would be no more removed

from geological reality. “Scottsmount”

might even have worked, since, unlike a dale,

there is a mountain here. It’s called Camelback

because it looks like a camel’s back. Beside it, another little

hill that the natives, early settlers, and hundred years

of Arizonans called “Squaw Peak” was renamed

when Puritans decided a squaw was no longer an honorable

thing to be, for the first American woman

dead in Iraqi combat, when it was decided that Iraqi

combatants, or woman soldiers were more

honorable than squaws.

The camel has a rock formation on its nose

that looks like a monk praying to the camel’s forehead.

He may be praying for the woman dead in Iraqi combat.

Or all the dead squaws. Or Winifred Scott.

He may be praying for the chaparral pines,

which are the only living things in this poem so far.

Or he may be a pile of rocks on a camel’s nose. Or

a mountain’s face. For the whole personified

world in its heat and bronze shame.