Feathery is my flight
from Santa Fe to Phoenix,
driving on my way
to where my father lies
bleeding inside himself.
A laundromat-hot afternoon
pounds through open windows,
tangling my hair into the froth
of my most unloved dolls,
gagged by the want
of a mouth on theirs.
Rising up, three,
four miles ahead, a herd
of shadow-ribbed stallions
lend a brittle silhouette
to the horizon.
Minus distance,
the horses morph into huts -
an Indian village halo-ed
in blue heat, home of the living dead,
an old cartoon of itself.
Pumping fuel,
I gulp down curdled heartbreak,
country love songs spooned
from the neck of a guitar
onto the gravel of airwaves.
The air eats at my eyes
and the diseased metal
of a Coca-Cola sign clangs
haplessly at an unseen thirst.
The words, Blue Water, taunt.
Hearing a semi go by on the highway,
I think of horses stampeding,
my father breathing out through his mouth.
Tumbleweed too heavy for the earth.
His lips,
baked into parchment C’s
by the papery fever of a last stand,
drink in the petroleum jelly
the nurse smears over them.
The day endures,
the taste of gasoline
beginning its slow, acrid creep
across our tongues –
organs too far gone
to spit and swear.
Nothing else in the
passage of nine, brown-land
blue-sky Ford-Mustang hours
it takes to get to where
she sits stroking his hand.
Hours later
before she pulls the sheet up over his face,
I rub my sunburned face
across his dead mouth
until I gleam.
