I passed these signs as I was coming here tonight,
and so I couldn't resist reading the poem, "The Thing."
"The huge signs hug the road from Deming
to the middle of nowhere, advertising gas,
the last fueling place, coffee.
Asking you to witness the thing.
Indeed many things from all over the world.
Elephant carvings from Africa, Italian tapestries depicting
the Last Supper, yellow butterflies, and placemats,
and the moon shot shaky grace of toy privies.
Shelves full of sly ceramics plugging ashtray jokes,
and feathered tomahawks made in Japan.
Glass balls stuffed with alembics and mustard seeds.
Pay your $0.50 and go to see The Thing.
Pried out of the ground by tons of water,
the thing is a flexed skeleton, one arm enfolding a waxen baby.
In a cultural paradox, this basket
make her mother and her child mummified
by the desert thrombosed by time, spilled out
to the miners hose.
The beguiled are fastened by their eyes to what they see.
They also dark sand blasted by shimmery lassitudes of light.
The agile water scooped the grave out
of the canyon, the floater, and the floating baby.
Food for the museum along the highway
emerged in grotesque tender rags.
They lie side by side.
Al Capone's getaway car stands nearby,
and the burlesque is completed by Der Fuhrer's Mercedes Benz.
This place put together by a jackdaw genius
is a jigsaw of civilization.
Sunset burns blue along the abrasions of the bullet
holes and the Athabaskan's human pain.
This is a grotto where noon kneels to spiders,
hairy starved tarantulas and scorpions whose world is
a membrane of venom and ashes curved and flick of a tail.
Carried up and out in spasmodic ways, the mummies,
the dictators, the dead float in the light
where we have anchored them.
Things dry out here.
Their dry eyes on us."