I've been in the Southwest before, although only
once before in Tucson, and that was 25 years ago.
But I thought I would read this poem, which I wrote in--
the place I can't remember the name of it.
It's just north of Flagstaff.
And there's a town nearby, which is called Rimrock,
and there's a little national monument or a park
there with the remains of an ancient Pueblo.
The name of the poem is "Rimrock, Where It Is."
"Ruin, time ruined, all these once good things.
The structure of many rooms built in the sun.
A refuge from sun.
But its parts have gone wandering there
down the hillside in flowers.
A few doorways remain, arched gently,
open to a white hot sky, though through them
the spirits long since ceased to pass.
Ladders mount the walls rung by rung to nowhere.
The city of desolation, creviced for the scorpion,
is pierced everywhere by sun, whose mindless and mythical
command beats down with the same force as when its liege folk
listen, generate, generate.
Only scorpions here, the female eating the males
head while they couple.
Nearby in a refuge of poured concrete and glass
a small woman, small as a girl, black with time, lies and lies,
always raising her head, her charred face.
Always raising her knees in a mock of childbirth.
Always opening her mouth that is gagged with dust.
Always screaming.
It reverberates, wave on wave, the desert's pulse.
And the blind albino fish, relic of a once vast species that
swims in the lake at the bottom of the deepest cave in Arizona,
in darkness or in glittering rays of flashlights,
goes round and round and round."