This is called The Blue Flame.
Another day forcing me into place.
The sun stunning, the courtyard at noon some circle
of hell I don't mind at all.
Neighbors off to school, to work,
even the dark women who already have hung on a rope wet whites,
magentas, and aquamarines.
No resolutions to speak of.
No release come easy like a break in the weather.
But no ugly fights either.
No shrieking recriminations to bring the police.
Cobwebs on the cactus, on the agave
and its secret intoxication.
And the endless yarn of the mouse in deep decomposition.
Hour after hour, a potent stillness
upon which nothing that is not essential can intrude,
like that drive through the Sonora in murderous mid-summer.
The pickup, nicknamed "the blue flame."
No AC, just a steady combustion through heat
that suggested you sit still, breathe slowly, and keep
your mouth shut.
Monumental space impervious to human foolishness where even
the utility towers, massive as they were,
looked like little Hopi dancers frozen in place.
No telling how far I had to go or how hard it would be,
but terrain that austere reinforced the belief
I was here for the duration.
It's hard to say that word.
I was here for the duration.
Not always easy though, telling the ghost
towns from the live ones.
It took only seconds to pass through and often no
one in sight.
At most, a cowboy hat at a gas pump.
And once, a Navajo girl in black braids dragging on a long string
a dusty pair of tennis shoes.
Then the highway again, a strict line
forward through a billion years in which
life answered to no one but itself,
in which no man or a woman ruined the Earth for each other,
no water for miles, nothing to cultivate the power lines that
are far removed and then set back from the interstate
at the foot of a butte:
a small house, turquoise, astonishing as a mirage
that won't disappear.
The sheer fact was somebody lived here,
somebody who managed every day not to die.
Mile after mile, I wondered how and who and never once asked
why.
Any questions?
You're very quiet, which is OK.
You can be quiet.
Little story about the weather that I
remember from David Mamet.
It was a beautiful, just a gorgeous day,
and he was on an elevator.
And an old woman came on to the elevator,
and there was the traditional awkward silence.
And all of a sudden, she says to him, lovely weather, aren't we?
I'm willing to wait.
It's OK.
Talk about being at one with nature, you are the weather.