I didn't know I was the most boosted poet.
This poetry reading might be called
the last frontier and where it went or who stole it.
I'm going to pick out poems on that theme.
To begin with a prose journal from yesterday.
"High noon, high night Salome, Arizona October 9, 1967.
Two day's hard driving from San Francisco in a VW bus not built
for these wide open ranges staying tonight
in a big old stucco Adobe Motel in the middle of high desert.
100 miles Northwest of Phoenix Adobe buildings and wood roof
veranda and a swimming pool full of leaves,
green water, and algae, bugs, and cigarette wrappers.
A few soggy cigarettes float about like water bugs left over
from some other civilization.
1:30 in the hot afternoon, too hot
to continue in VW TP over the fried horizon.
High noon lasts all afternoon out here.
Nothing moves in the white sun, shadows black wherever there
are any and there aren't many.
Highway 60 stretches away. straigh in both directions
Salome, where she danced is the full official name
of this spot on Earth.
Salome pronounced Salome not salami or salami,
altitude 1875, home according to a local guidebook of Dick Wick
Hall, 1877, 1926 Arizona's first widely known humorist who
credited the town with an annual growth of 100% a year quote,
'19 people in 19 years,' unquote."
[LAUGHTER]
Looks like they've been adding one a year ever since.
"You my Indian country, gold rush country Park Walhalla Gold
Mine discovered by humans while high on peyote.
That high netted $15 million, state narco agents note.
Sheffler's of Salome, the name of the motel Inn restaurant
bar I'm at, the main restaurant room
a barn like affair with about 100 dusty horned heads
of all kinds of animals mounted high on the brown board walls.
I asked the counter lady, how long
those heads been up there staring down
at everybody, lady?
She says, 'don't rightly know.'
'Know anybody rightly whoever shot any of these animals,
lady?'
She gives me a strange look and goes away
looking very sorrowful.
When she has to come back past me I hit on her again,
'they've been up there long looking down at you may be 100
years, lady?'
She gives me another strange look, 'anything else you want,
mister?'
'Yes ma'am, I'll take two of those glass elk's eyes
on toast,' I tell her.
They look like they're about to fall in my plate anyway.
She looks at me like I'm John the Baptist or something
but doesn't start dancing.
Even though she looks like she'd like to have my head to hang
up, 'who danced for all those heads?'
I fling at her as she retreats to the kitchen
where I imagine her unsheathing a large scimitar.
antlers sprout from my head.
And my predecessor's stare down at me,
oh, the weird conversations that have gone on here
under those dusty antlers.
Five men in cowboy hats just piled in out of a pickup truck
line up at the counter laughing and joking
and slapping each other on the back.
A drunk silver haired Los Angeles tourist staggers out
of the dark cabin like bar with a good looking young chick
in tow.
And the cowboys I heard they've never seen a woman before.
[LAUGHTER]
And they'll travel all the way to San Francisco
to see what Salome looks like topless.
The chick steers her silver haired friend to the counter
and they plunk down right next to me.
She whispers in his ear and he points to a door in the corner
and she gets up and goes.
He shrugs and leers at me, been stopping here
every week for six months so I guess I ought to know
where Salome's crapper is.
Now it's my turn to regard a tourist darkly.
I catch myself asking, 'anything else you want, mister?'
The dusky wagon wheels overhead hung with dim light bulbs
turn and turn in the dusk of eternity.
I get up and walk around reading the various goofball
inscriptions quotations by Dick Wick Hall
all over the place, including a postcard of an awful poem
about his thirsty frog who wears a canteen in the desert.
Horrible way to be a poet--
easy way.
In the lobby on burlap walls, old canteens and branding irons
hung up along with black Bart's boots
cared what big feet he had.
Evidently passing through Salome one hot night
he took them off to dance with you-know-who.
And bye, bye black Bart.
Wears his head.
When I fall out it's dark and the town
has come alive suddenly in the desert at night.
All the daytime signs are neonized and blare out
down the street highway.
Sheffler's Motel, your cafe gas, a half moon very white
hangs over and the vibrant mysteriousness of the desert
seems to close in on all sides reminding me
of Albert Camus phrase about night's primitive hostility.
A great gleaming silver aluminum truck roars out of that night,
flashes through the four blocks of neons,
and plunges back into the darkness of the universe.
Salome dance through my night.
Woke up very early hearing voices
through a wall and thought of a woman's deep voice
heard in Spanish through a wall in a hotel in Malaga years ago.
She was moaning and moaning coming in the night.
She was a long time coming.
Now, still heard on great Southwest
plane in the heart of another world
and will go on the primitive inchoate
nightlife of the world, life against the night,
boy shored up against darkness and what has been will be.
[APPLAUSE]