REVISIONS

REVISIONS

I.               First Contact

Setting seasickness aside, there’s something sinister
in ships appearing on the shore.

II.             Battles

THE QUESTION THAT IS LIKE THE NAME YHWH:

Don’t we all at least tell ourselves
we’d fight to defend our homes?

If need be, I mean?

Blood and black dirt a civilizing force.

III.           Frontier

Before the service stations
hippy enclaves
truckers and their speed and driving
cattle,
before the Mormons,
before the west,

a place teeming with mammals,
reptiles,
and always,
always the cumulonimbus,
except on days when the bright burning
mirage of the sun seemed so constant
as to suggest that things would always
remain
thusly.

IV.            Modern Era

In a city I hadn’t seen in a minute
I saw an AIM tattoo on an arm that argued
with a confused cop.

Did the cities come on ships?

A documentary I saw a few months before:
a standoff in the prairie
on ground propped up with bodies
from a standoff in the prairie.

Nothing’s better now
but the prairie soil is fatigued
with standoffs
and suicides.

V.              Still Docked

Wrapped up in settler skin
I peer out the window of my mortgage.
My grass has gone to clover
right up to the cedar
fence I had put in.

The other way, a pond.
I squint to see a time before
                                    houses
                                    roads
                                    drainage ditches.

I squint to articulate
problem and its solution:
how to keep the ships
off of the shore.