Rotorua

In honor of our impending trip back to New Zealand tomorrow!, I wanted to post my Rotorua poem from last year's trip. I orginally envisioned writing a series of New Zealand poems--one for each day--and I still may do just that.

--- ---

The smell of sulfur lingers in my shirts,
wrapping these cotton threads in an
otherworldly musk that can't be machine washed,
that has to be worn
and eroded molecule by molecule

until the scent itself is just a memory of it,
fragmented and partial,
lumped in with other thin stretches of lake highway
and stream shrouded mudpits,
mobbed bus depots and
creek waterfalls like fire flowing on the outskirts of town,

and the bedsheets and white walls on Hinemoa Street
are infused with the same smell in the air
that swirls unseen over us and into our
lungs like bellows at the fire,
pumping and prevailing
some minute portion of that acrid substance
to mix through my swirling blood,

and then I am it and it me, a more
complete and more ruined creature:
part mineral, part man.

Sego

I finally have posted my next poem. Long wait. About the ghost town of Sego in the Book Cliffs.

--- ---

Bones of old coal-surveyors
buried somewhere--everywhere--
under deer-trampled sage
and rickety leaning piles of roof timbers
eroding thin like coffin lids.
These are perched
over fallen tin and concrete foundation,
the rumpled stuff of hollowed financial dreams.

Sandstone brick stacked and crumbling,
a soaring facade
slowly removing itself
deep into morning's light.
The bank saferoom bored underground
once black and secret, now
scorched and sun-opened.

Cottonwood leaves
rustle the night a convincing waterfall echo--
though the wetsand trickle in the wash
indicates otherwise.
These burnt-orange frames of hundred-year
cars mind the weather well, rust in place here
against wind, snow, bullets.

Long before we struggled around this way
these cars made it up here.
Everything makes it here eventually,
wind through the ghosted desert.




..................[the southwest]

 - New Mexico in October

 - Sego

New Mexico in October

I'm going to write a series of poems representing our 10-day trip through New Mexico and the southwest in October 2010. I want to accompany them with photographs. This represents an overlook, my feelings of coming off and out of that land.

--- ---

There was yucca everywhere,
and sagebrush and rabbitbrush
and prickly pear and cholla.
Huge thunderheads painting it all
gray and wet.
Endless skylines, interrupting mountain
ranges, sand and hot springs and caves.
Camping just about anywhere.
I've got a shining new buckle
inlaid with black and turquoise, inscribed with the state's name and an eagle--
a parting birthday gift
out on those white dunes.

Now I'm 31
and home again for a little while.

..................[the southwest]

 -- New Mexico in October

 -- Sego