A History of the American West

The West slept on an open raft.  His chest was brown and flecked with hair. 

Hat tipped forward to cover his eyes, one hand limp and cutting the water,

the other draped over his thigh, touching his thigh—

                                      Skin like tobacco, skin

gone coarse and dry,

and like John Brown the sun rose and rose, then died

in the empty sky.

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An eyelash twitched, the eyeball rolled beneath the lid. Purse of lips, the tongue

that played behind the teeth in sleep. The West

     was dreaming about fields,

about a clutter of rising birds, how they lift from the waving grass like nets

and into the sky.

                The raft turned in the current, nudged the shore.

The West licked his drying lips, dreamed now of a boy—himself—on a horse

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looking over a field of singing birds, off to the desert’s edge, a clot of buildings,

a shadow on the sand around it.

                       From far away, the voices of girls say,

Yes.  Say, Come from the horse with your hat and your leather.  Say, how beautiful,

your hair  blown back and filled with sand, cheeks that are red where the weather

bit them.  The West smiled in sleep,

 ran his tongue over sharpened teeth.

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Years later, of course, our bombs disturbed the desert, blooming like orchids.

Years later, we watered the sand with pent-up ideas: fallout, cancer, birds

caught in the cloud and down

                    to the dunes with them,

the thud of breaking bodies, wings torn back and rustling in the grass.

One day, the sky was blue as an eye pinned open.  Then the flash and rush of wind,

the stalk that rose and split, and petals, gray and black.

                                         And lush.

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In the dream, the girls say, Lush.  Say, Lips, wet where the dew has kissed them. 

And, sand caressing the hair blown back.

  Girls in the cluster of a desert town,

girls in the schoolyard holding out their arms to him,

                                   and the West, on his raft,

dreams of ribbons, sunburnt legs, the West, who has no family he remembers,

the West, raised on a raft or a plow,

             who cannot recall, but in the dream

pushes westward into the sand.

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He slept and slept, stalled in the brush at the river bank. 

                                          Water lapped

against the raft. His smooth chest rose and fell.  Gorgeous in his jeans

and sunburnt arms,

                  gone to the bomb blast and the gasp of time,

to Brigham Young and his wagonload of wives, the heel and rein

of men on horseback. The railroad, the gasp and churn of every train.

Cather, Crane,

           and dustclouds when, for weeks, the farms burned

under rainless skies.

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The West content and tan, because that is his history,

                                            caught in an eddy,

gone to everything but the gentle dream in which the West rides westward,

toward the sun, the desert town,

     into the girls who crowd around,

who touch the horse’s sweat-damp coat, who stroke the shank, the saddle,

and his thigh—lush, lush, they say,

              then smile and haul him down.