And, OK, page 18.
I have to do this today, because Lois Shelton very kindly took
me out to see some cacti and the vista in the countryside.
As you can tell from this poem--
this is my first visit to the west,
definitely to the southwest.
As you can tell from this poem, I
know nothing about the west or the southwest.
The only thing I know is based upon John Ford movies,
and this is a poem about John Ford, who made a lot of movies
with John Wayne, and set in the west.
Movies like Stagecoach, and Fort Apache,
and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and his masterpiece
The Searchers.
So this is a poem, sort of, about that.
It's called "Vague Consoles."
"This vista often awarded John Ford his rest.
Myself, scenery has a lack of I emphasis,
and haven't we killed all the Indians yet?
In a stagecoach, made of sagebrush,
no doubt, I would gauche out, like a tumbleweed at a sock
hop.
Yo, see it roll over the old gym floor, lobato basketball,
then, toed by foetid teens, fall, slow-mo,
as though some flair for the vague consoles.
Oh, lips refusing their tongues' rights,
bodies trying to put down the peaceful demands
of their genitalia.
Everything looks better shot through John Wayne's hurt.
The sky, the way it maps, the desert,
a lone rider whose moral I await, the crutches arranging
themselves for death."
That's my memory of western movies.