Category: Poetry

Happiness in Kashgar

“Take my picture!”

She’d seen my camera
A foreigner with a camera

“Take my picture!”

Happily, I oblige
Line her up with the street
The cyclist, passing by

Four wheels
Four cylinders
Four windows
All rolled down

At eighty
Kilometers per hour
4-80 air conditioning

Abandoned
Grey and withering
Under a hot blue sky

First glass
Now wood
And the grass grows high

The Guinness is expensive
But the house lager is not
The bar maids all pretty
In pleated skirts and knee socks

I come for my friends
For the best band in the town
For the wood and the charm
The best Après around

I love these wide open spaces
With their sparse grasses
And iron red soil

I love a sky
Unobstructed
Cloud-filled and a little ornery

We’ve tamed the river
Far below
A dam built down a ways

The Colorado
Takes a pause
Between a hundred million days

There is little more satisfying
To me
Than a road trip
Through unknown country

Nature’s patterns
Repeat
In scale
And context

A Martian landscape?
Or an Earthly detail?

We leave our mark on things
Our names
A symbol
A statement
Of politics
Or preference
Of love
Or hatred
Or indifference
Or ignorance

Here and there the elements conspire
Like where the Earth heaves up
And breathes out strange beauties
From its belly of fire

Like here, where the fires burned
In Yellowstone
And the sky shone purple
Above the sun’s yellow, turned