“Mojave Ghost” 

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Men arm themselves with facts.
They say, already reaching, Let me
see that. They ask, seriously, Who
is your second favorite tenor sax player
between ’63 and ’65? Each
thinks the other is a bit emptier, more
cardboard than himself, that he alone
made the necessary decisions. Only
I live the real real, he thinks. I think.

Night wind clanging rope against the flagpole.

There is nothing in me now
of what I was before. That’s
what he tells himself. In order
to live with himself.

Nearly midnight. On the dimly moonlit
porch, his boots lined up neatly
at the front door. Three of the four
black laces are tucked into the boots’ collars
but one has gone loose, spilling from the eyelet
to the concrete like a thin blood trail.

I found my necessity, too, was provisional,
and whatever was essential in me had gone slack
behind certain irrevocable choices I made.

She asked quietly if he noticed.
What? How the small moths come out
at dusk, but the big ones— these, she said
casting her eyes into the darkness,
only after midnight.

A studied lack of correlation between his eyes,
intent on her lips, and what he wants, which is
somewhere else.

That spangled negation she so casually calls evening.

It all changes
in the seconds it takes for a parasite
in the saliva of a sand fly
to replicate itself in the gut
and migrate to the fly’s proboscis.

Waking alone
into the faintly semen-smell of the middle of the night.

*

Back here, he imagines her
everywhere he looks. As the spring hills boing green.

All awake are the crows.

Flayed by the paper cut of her scent in his memory.

For her, it was home. This town
where various stirps of Christian
fundamentalism intersect
with unchecked retail sprawl.

Now the train just pass on through.

One man hosing out a cement mixer
at the gravel pit. A form of forced confession.

Bright afternoon, and the young woman walks slowly
to her car across the Mastectomy Center parking lot.

How our friend died here: disheveled, looking
down and reading a book as he hiked
along the shoulder of the interstate.

However long I mean to hold on to them
as possibilities, my untaken trajectories begin
to shrivel away from my self-identification.

What he remembers is her voice charged
with enthusiasms. And that point of inflection
in his life when he saw she knew how he was
awed by her disciplined inattention. Oh,
she had added, ecstatic, and I love
the smell of breeder houses after rain.

*

Back at Lana’s Diner, watching the woman
at the far table sweep her hair to her other shoulder
and flash her teeth at her companion.

Red sauce, says the woman when her eggs come,
and the waitress returns with ketchup.

As I’m picking up my check
from the table where I’ve eaten alone,
the waitress calls Come again, and
instinctively I answer, We will.

Handwritten note near the cash register:
Do Not Lean Arm on Pecan Roll.

So I pay up and step into humid
rock-flavored afternoon heat.
Dark pompadour clouds casting giant shadows.

Gonna be a gully-washer.

Technically it is stunned, not
dead. And though the retractable bolt
has obliterated the cow’s brain,
the nicotine Saturn of its still-
open eye seems to regard me.

What bird wove those sprigs of lavender, mint, yarrow,
and citronella into a nest below our rusted porch light?

Just before the rain begins to blow more rain against the rain.

______________________________

Mojave Ghost by Forrest Gander is available via New Directions Publishing.