WEBVTT

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I've been in the Southwest
before, although only

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once before in Tucson,
and that was 25 years ago.

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But I thought I would read
this poem, which I wrote in--

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the place I can't
remember the name of it.

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It's just north of Flagstaff.

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And there's a town nearby,
which is called Rimrock,

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and there's a little
national monument or a park

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there with the remains
of an ancient Pueblo.

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The name of the poem is
"Rimrock, Where It Is."

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"Ruin, time ruined, all
these once good things.

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The structure of many
rooms built in the sun.

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A refuge from sun.

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But its parts have
gone wandering there

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down the hillside in flowers.

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A few doorways
remain, arched gently,

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open to a white hot
sky, though through them

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the spirits long
since ceased to pass.

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Ladders mount the walls
rung by rung to nowhere.

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The city of desolation,
creviced for the scorpion,

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is pierced everywhere by sun,
whose mindless and mythical

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command beats down with the same
force as when its liege folk

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listen, generate, generate.

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Only scorpions here, the
female eating the males

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head while they couple.

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Nearby in a refuge of
poured concrete and glass

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a small woman, small as a girl,
black with time, lies and lies,

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always raising her
head, her charred face.

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Always raising her knees
in a mock of childbirth.

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Always opening her mouth
that is gagged with dust.

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Always screaming.

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It reverberates, wave on
wave, the desert's pulse.

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And the blind albino fish, relic
of a once vast species that

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swims in the lake at the bottom
of the deepest cave in Arizona,

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in darkness or in glittering
rays of flashlights,

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goes round and round and round."

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