Hahaha, yes, falling off horses!--but ouch, too--you definitely know
you missed seeing something you should have, or you did something else
wrong when a horse gets you off their back. I fell off one in a huge
prairie dog town out on the flats south of Grand Canyon (friends there
were ranchers) once--a treacherous place for horses, who can break a
leg in the numerous, unforeseen, deep and tunneled holes the prairie
dogs make to live in and scoot around underground to escape predators.
Those critters are huge there, too. So are chipmunks. The horse was
okay, and so was I, but who would have thought it could come to
that--prairie completely overgrown with prairie dogs, holes so deep as
to break a horse's leg. The prairie dogs must have been run off from
somewhere else. The high concentration of tourist visitation in the
National Park, perhaps.
Hey these poems really seem to me to evidence the ethos and the mythos
of the U.S. southwest. A lot of contradiction in these regions in
terms of geographic and geopolitical spaces that, unlike more populated
eastern locales, whether urban or not (in the west), still do have the
unsettled historical relation and feel of being unreconciled to polity.
Hiking, for example, in any wilderness area, it's easy to feel that
the space is not owned by any one or any polity, that it survives
beyond such human arrogances. Of course that's also self deluded
since the global eco-system is affected everywhere by what is
destructive human intervention in the environment, and since the idea
of preservation in the form of public land is also a form of
contradictory intervention. Yet that unsettled feeling, like the
pressing one of frenetic over-development also felt in those areas,
persists on some level, so is cause for some question and thought, even
if conventional logic would set feeling aside as unresolvable.
Hal, thanks for these poems--they've given me reasons to think harder
and more about such issues.
Best,
chris
http://texfiles.blogspot.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Halvard Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 16:49:40 -0500
Subject: Re: Rebecca Seiferle/Chris's blog
{ Environmentally the related problems/issues of development are
most
{ serious, too: they (whoever "they" are/is) seem quickly to be
filling
{ up every possible space (they aren't eveing billing the
empty-flatness
{ as scenic any more) in states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and New
{ Mexico (tho maybe not so quickly NM--so little economy there, I
guess).
{ I see it when i drive cross country to visit in Arizona twice a
year
{ or so. The feeling I get on observing it over time is one of
frenetic
{ desperation, though of course I'm being dramatic about that, and
it is
{ just an intuitive hunch, but nonetheless a repeated feeling. These
{ places have all gone development-insane--they're building houses
on top
{ of houses in places that have very little ground water supply.
Herewith, an oldie or two of mine about the way things were (or might
have
been) out there:
Stunt
Nothing much harder
than falling off a horse.
By grace of whatever--
no broken neck.
Ranging west,
driving across salt flats after dark.
High peaks--behind and to the north--
shrouded in darkness and tattered cloud.
Headlights pop up on the horizon,
steadily bear down upon you for half an hour,
maybe more--whoosh by--red taillights
jiggle in the mirror, half an hour more.
Nothing fades. It stretches and breaks.
The trick is to survive the snap-back.
In the West
What do you do
out in the West
where the proud remnants
of European aristocracy
climb down from their phaetons
in haughty disarray
and walk, bare-headed, into the desert
never to be heard from again
unless it is in some dusty town
called Drygulch or Sidewinder,
bypassed by the railroad,
wells long ago gone dry,
where they take their parched throats,
their sun-cracked faces,
into the only saloon left in town
and ask the one-eyed barkeep
for champagne, and are told that
there's one bottle left
which he's kept for just
such an occasion?
Hal Please stand clear of the closing doors.
Halvard Johnson
===============
email: [log in to unmask]
website: http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
blog: http://entropyandme.blogspot.com/
|