SHIPROCK
Scrub
landscape and stubble houses, junked automobiles parked nearby,
trees felled and stripped for telephone posts, clumps of emaciated
bushes pressed and scoured, this
parody gripped by fingers anxious as clocks
having lost their hands to digital display.
Monstrous
tailings of radioactive ordure, the fabulous white bird who
ripped open this region's stubborn womb carried children
to his synoptic nest, cleaving their tongues, bating their
breath in the marrow of scintillated bone.
Igneous spire
rises with
heart
in a vision
inverted
between maintenance
and despair,
no longer
flashing, but
ticking, we
are almost
always there.
