I marked a couple of other Arizona poems in here.
One that, this-- this was written
somewhere in the mountains outside Tucson.
But I can't remember how far outside Tucson.
Might have been quite some ways.
Anyway, I don't think of this as a Phoenix poem.
And I was leafing through this book
today, wondering what the hell to read tonight.
And I could remember this afternoon very vividly,
because I was walking around in the 98 degree heat today.
Anyway, this is just called "Poem."
"There was something I can't bring myself to mention
in the way the light seemed trapped by the clouds,
the way the road dropped from pavement to dirt,
and the land from pine to scrub.
The red-headed vultures on dead animals.
The hatred of the waitress breaking a cup
and kicking the shards across the cafe that looked out
on the mountain and on the white smear of the copper mine that
sustained these people.
I claimed there was something you wouldn't
have wanted to speak of either.
A sense of some violent treasure, like uranium, waiting
to be romanced out of the land.
They sat under white umbrellas--
two or three together, elbows on card tables at the dirt
roads leading to the mines.
Rising each at his turn to walk around a while with a sign,
announcing they were on strike.
Their crystalline and indelible faces in the hundred degree heat
like the faces of slaughtered hogs.
And God forgive me.
I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem."