Travelogue (Blues Chorus#32)

Pale red sun rising
waterly-an eastern expanse
of purple sage and scrub pine
starting to shimmer in the desert morning...

Fresh yellow and green buds, still moist
from the cool night, on the pine
betray the desolation beyond-an "Indian" reservation,
sun-scorched shanties, bleached bones of graveyard cars and trucks...

A small untidy blight
lodged between the highway billboards
for turquoise and onyx trading posts
just ahead...

A nation in motion-
the past Sunday the sleek cabined semis
were lined up a dozen deep
at the "Love's" truck stop...

On the four Interstate lanes of new asphalt
RV's whiz by in tinted glass
and air-conditioned isolation.
In the neat rows of pumps, our Volvo-

its rear cross-hatched with feminist bumper stickers-
seems quaint...
Earlier we rolled past
casino after casino-

monuments to possibility-
however long shot it may be.
Semis and RV's filled the parking lots
(like worker bees around an artificial honeycomb)...

Dropping down through Nevada,
the sun danced along
the straight line of tarmac
stretched to the horizon…

Not much on either side
except square-holed, weed-filled ghosts,
vacant reminders
of Westward Ho!

Las Vegas itself
resplendent with sprawling new
subdivision after subdivision.
Plenty of newly prosperous-

perhaps our country's "non-believers"
paying homage
at the alter
of that roulette Wheel of Fortuna...

At Santa Fe we skipped
the merchant's Canyon, with its
exquisitely crafted turquoise and silver,
in favor of the Georgia O'Keefe museum. Inside

the time-wrinkled sandstone hills about us-
dotted with green pine, log and peach-tinted adobe houses-
were transformed by the soft blends of her colorful vision
into vulvas, a desert abloom with delicate wildflowers...

Winding along the Rio Grande,
amongst sun-darkened boulders and skree,
we arrive in magical Taos.
Sitting in the legendary Rainbow Room-

in overstuffed chairs beneath a crooked bamboo ceiling,
the one time literary sanctuary
cool and still inside the huge, hogan-like walls,
still pregnant with philosophical conversation, I wonder

Where have all the Mabel Dodge's gone?...

Downtown, the galleries full of knock-off O'Keefe's,
the cute stores full of expensive curios,
the over-priced atmospheric restaurants
fail to garner our attention.

So we drive out the legendary roustabout
Kit Carson's Way-on the steep hills around us
tall jack pines, poplars beginning to blaze
with early gold...

Here and there, amidst the big modern
art and pottery studios-
and the "Moon Valley" RV Park
(a broad flat patch of crushed granite

next to the new golf course)
sit rusted-yellow school buses
tucked into nooks and crannies
of someone's notion of a homestead...

In the rear window of one
hangs tattered
rainbow shards
of a shade...

Deep in the National Forest
we camp for the night
at a trailhead
beneath a dark expanse breathtaking with stars.

In the morning, walking the frost-glazed trail,
I see three huge black crows take flight-one turning
in the mountain-blue air above. As if arcing
protective wings towards the mist of the valley below...

^

Biography

Tom Noonan is a Bay Area (US) multimedia artist. This piece, written in homage to Homer's Iliad, originally started out of research into the "Elegy for Art O'Leary." Written by his wife, Eileen after her husband's untimely demise at the hands of a Protestant, it's a favorite of mine from that Irish era of those intense poems keening the purges effected by the Puritan Cromwell et al.