This next poem is the title poem, it's called "Sightlines."
and I need to say a few words about it.
It's an invented form.
It's set in the Pewaukee Valley, about 20 miles North
of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
And in this valley, two rivers come down
from the mountains, the Rio Nambe and the Rio Tesuque,
and they form the Pewaukee river, which
goes out to the Rio Grande.
And on the west mesa, if you're hiking in that valley,
you can see the water towers and some of the buildings
from Los Alamos.
So the birthplace of the atom bomb
is there in this very remote location.
You might think you're escaping from everything,
but in fact you can't.
It's right there.
And I see the poem as an experiment in repetition.
Instead of starting each line with the same word
or ending each line with the same word,
I had a lot of one line stanzas.
There were like flashes or one line haikus.
And I was thinking about how to string them together
and I wanted a kind of music or musicality and a kind of rigor.
And I hit upon this idea that each line
would pick up a word or words from the previous line.
And when I tried that out, it was like the whole poem came
together like a big crystal.
So it's there in the title, there's
a kind of a line by line motion and then it circles back,
and it moves all over space and time.
"Sightlines."
I'm walking in sight of the Rio Nambe.
Salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch.
The snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos
has already dwindled before spring.
At least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos.
The plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site.
A man who built plutonium triggers breeds horses now.
No one could anticipate this distance from Monticello.
Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out
of ourselves.
During the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot
by a firing squad.
A woman detonates when a spam text triggers
bombs strapped to her body.
When I come to an upright, circular, steel lid,
I step out of the ditch.
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself.
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring.
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng, my talisman of desire.
Though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips.
Though I step back into the ditch,
no whitening cloud dispels this world's mystery.
The ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase.
I'm walking on silk, glimpsing horses in the field.
Fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand.
Though parallel lines touch in the infinite,
the infinite is here.