- My
favorite towns are Ghost towns
- By myself, I
can feel their spirits
- Hear the piano,
the laughter, the outbursts
- the laments,
the threats, the curse
-
- The collapsed
saloon, the caved-in general store
- The overgrown
cemetery, the abandoned cat house
- where they
bartered transient flesh
- for silver by
the ounce
-
- —Ahhhhh, the
eerie loneliness of ghost towns
- It's what I
wish would happen to most towns
-
- When I see
- Creosote bush
and sagebrush blocking off main street
- Pinyon and
ocotillo tripping up my feet
- Barrel cactus
pushing apart well-laid cobblestones
- Mesquite and
palo verde reaching through broken windows
-
- When I see
- Corral fences
lying broken and unattended
- Where once wild
horses were rounded up and roped
- When I see
everything that man built going back to the earth
-
- It’s at times
like these that I still feel some hope
-
- Dwight
Worker
-
- edited by Dennis Fritzinger,
Karen Coulter, and Dwight Metzger. feral press, Tuscon,
Arizona 1998.
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- My
knees ache a dull throb and I stop to marvel that they haven’t yet
buckled
- My attention is
diverted though and I stare in gaping awe of your movement—you are
flowing North, you are running home
- And I am still,
wincing and pondering pain and fluidity
-
- My pack is
neatly, though disproportionately, stuffed and the weight shifts
- I am
struggling, grumbling when I notice the smell—the sweet, wet aroma of
crushed wild strawberries beneath my feet
- I am laughing,
fondling the delicate fruit and forgetting my tired back
-
- Many times,
many afternoons, I have filled my belly here, delighted my tongue with
huckleberries, thimbleberry, whortleberry, water
- Many evenings I
have dozed in your darkening canyon walls, lulled through digestion by
the rhythmic dancing of your rapids, your course
-
- This time I am
weeping amid my folly and I am ashamed to know through the blasting of
dynamite, the scream of helicopters and saws that I did not fight hard
enough to save you.
-
- Darryl Echt
-
- edited by Dennis Fritzinger,
Karen Coulter, and Dwight Metzger. feral press, Tuscon,
Arizona 1998.
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