INEVITABLE WEATHER

Quite simply, the local paper says
They could be anybody’s bones,
Bones chewed beneath
The rude discs that rise
And fall like tarnished moons
Each autumn,
Each year for the last hundred
That farmers have plowed
Under what’s left
Of the season’s alfalfa stubble.

Quail feathers spot the road
Across the Gila River floodplain
That takes me swiftly
The shortest way to Highway 8
Linking Phoenix
With an ocean three-hundred
Dry miles into the sun. Every autumn

I make this trip of visions
of tractors and combines,
Of the homesteads of silt
The Indians have leased
To farmers

Like the one I see
At the very end of the earth,
Riding a wheel taller
Than any man I know
Casting out galaxies of dust
Near a single midfield cottonwood.
No Indians here,
Though the reservation
Is always in sight
With its landmarks few
Have a tongue
To pronounce. I’m told
The Tohono O'Odham
Now live along the river bottom
Where mesquite and touchy copperheads
Grow unreasonably thick–
When they come out,
It’s for beer and a short-cut
Across the aisles of ready corn

That some get lost in
Only to emerge
Some other time at the dead end
Of winter when another crop is due.

Driving Through the Pima Indian Reservation

Out here where the summer air
Is thick with the breath
Of every wheat moth
That ever lived,
I take to the broken roads
That seem different versions
Of the same strange story.

We have given the Pimas
This arid stretch
Of flood plain
And ornamented their horizons
With the busy constellations
Of prospering Mormon towns.

Here, in the muddy dark,
Their clapboard government mansions
Burst thin, razor-edges of light
That scarcely threaten
Any city limit,
And everyone is safe.

If we are to judge
From the pose of sleeping dogs
And the colic tilt
Of an abandoned refrigerator,
This is the land
Of spare parts and disregard.
Cities elbow
Around on three greedy sides.

It just might be true
That these are the poorest folk we know,
Hunched over
Television sets, their
Faces pale in the luminescent air–

And it could be just as true,
As I pass
The quickest way home,
That here burns
A greater medicine which has dappled
And feathered them with the light

Of many suffering moons–

A light that shall be returned
To the night sky when the stars
Of our easy invention
Have all but gone away.