G h o s t T ow n of
s
th e
E n c h a n te d Poems by John Poch
Images by Ryan Burkhart
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The Ghost Town It need not be a desiccated wreck of boards, completely uninhabited, adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck, it might be verdant and jackrabbited. The wind might not lament; the gift shop door could jingle bells, the jasmine candles wafting. Beyond some seniors at the convenience store, you might observe a fisherman shoplifting. But say it’s vacant and bunch grass gray. Then torch an image, scent, or song from your present life to reconstruct the step, the stairs, the porch, the house, town, two men fighting with a knife. Much like the architecture of a sonnet: a step, and suddenly you die upon it.
Red River They moved the old schoolhouse to the edge of town and turned it into a last–resort museum where no one goes. The tourists come to clown. They’re sick of facts, had it with the ad nauseam of life, have driven this height for gunfight stunts and punctuated equilibrium. More lovely the cowboys falling from false fronts onto a cardboard–mattress medium than the hard history of molybdenum. And no bugs! The river’s greenish–blue infusion and tested pesticides get rid of them. Dilution is the solution to pollution: every river purges itself in time. If that fails, they superfund the mine.
E–town (Elizabeth) A queen’s name cut to a shriek, though the mayor (her father) tried. Lonely as a wind–worn sluice box, a sparrow whistles her E flat. Nothing’s fair. What’s left of the vigilante’s roughest justice: tourists ghost–towning the former county seat over from Red River–Mom, Dad less than thrilled, kids tired of trout ponds, jerky from real elk meat. A closer look below the cutthroat gills: Time spawns me over tailings, murders past, blood–gold, unpleasant native genocides. The Big Ditch swells with little clumps of grass. The better cemetery view landslides, spills heavy meadows in every direction. It doesn’t take an Indian insurrection.
Baldy It’s one dumb moral failure to have blamed and another to misname the Indians, but after they were gone, our men renamed a bald peak thinking rock thought for eons. Even worse to name the tiny mining town the same, to drill from there, stone–deaf, gold–blind, on gut instinct, a hole the size of a man toward one just opposite – never to find the quartz veins bearing gold like the arms of a charming, horizontal woman spread wide. We brought for her unnecessary harms and business. Our bald–faced miners died and left the holy views to the boy scouts imagining the old west ins and outs.
Cimarron (Old Aztec Mill Museum) The boy scouts wandering the town would rather obtain another iron–on red badge of meritorious denial than hazard a guess at why the old folks keep this trash. And yet they have their harebrained fun, flipping over the petrified turtle forever turtling, ogling Ruby Gobble whom the clippings show jumping a Buick on her horse, cowgirling, fastidious in neckerchief and khakis. The scouts don’t recognize they’re dressed like her, won’t mourn the postered, haggard Cherokees. They think of themselves as native, hunters, hikers, and isn’t this the way? Pater Noster, what can we learn from a 1913 toaster?
Colfax I whoop and wave my arms but can’t make thunder the lazy–gazing, dozen buffalo munching in the distance. Thus this blunder through the sunflower field (the off–yellow pollen fallen onto, staining my shirt) to the wreckage of a wooden dining car. Fed up, I move to more ruins, bricks of dirt and straw. Adobe once charming from afar, the formerly mortared walls crumble, plain. Some rocks I drop in the dangerous open cistern foil the reflected sky and mimic rain. The avaricious upstream made thirst history, diverting the Vermejo to irrigated ditches. Our town downstream evaporated.
Dawson Mining disasters in 1913 and 1923 claimed the lives of nearly four hundred men.
After the heavy rains, on the river bank, a broken wheel from a mining car glows green. A minor miracle, years after it sank, surfaces, obsolete if almost clean. Verdigris wheel in my open hand, you hauled coal thousands named “a living” from the depths— the fuel the miners’ widows cursed. They called into the caves caved in, then called it quits. Better to turn attention to the ground for the shards of crocks and pretty pottery, the violet glass that must have once adorned the windows of their houses. Poetry need not baptize its matter with utter losses. On the hill sunflowers bury the iron crosses.
Taos Pueblo The glossy pueblo pamphlet lets us know we’re WINNERS (craps, blackjack, slots), though we don’t need the top shelf liquor shots for close–to–free at Taos Mountain Casino, luring us with the pecuniary porno– graphic. We came for culture, the native arts, but the shops are as unique as mini–marts. We prefer the kiva, the drying rack, the horno. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a kimono hanging with the kachinas, dreamcatchers, pots, and Chinese turquoise rings (forget–me–nots). Who comes to praise this sacred place should know, in San Geronimo, a symbolic casket lies to the right of the dais. What would you ask it?
Rancho de Taos (St. Francisco de Asis) The most photographed church in America, some say. And you’d agree if, on a tour, you too step through some ogler’s view, hiccup his shot, and the shutterbug gives you what for. Though O’Keefe saw petals in the architecture and a million Ansel Adams’ pious posters can’t be wrong, they don’t compare to a picture with m e in it. What’s real, what’s art most for, what’s my body doing here? Where is the house of God? More than artsy or touchy–feely, I enter in. These walls just outside Taos capture souls like cameras. The secret? Really, Rancho is a ghost town in reverse, the ancestors re–stuccoing the church.
The Ghost Cut off, even in the blossoms of my sin. — the Ghost of King Hamlet Whom do you pursue? A dead dog? A flea? — King David to King Saul
You’d rather claim necessity, raw need the reason for your body disappearing into the timber–propped rock throat than greed. Neither discretionary path nor steering allowed, you allot your hands to sudden touch like the blind, dreaming and lost in library stacks. The shelves are lead–leaved, ore–bound. Any torch is treacherous. The books have turned their backs. One day, you were streamside after lunch, turning a battered pan with surprising gold glints in it, counting trees as sluice box board feet, yearning for flumes, a dredge, cyanide fumes—next minute you’re a has–been king, ear–aching in a cave, reduced to rags, to the kin you cannot save.
The Miner The black pickaxe erodes his grotesque shoulder. On his knees already, he works his dark way west and with each vicious swing grows grossly older. He bends his crooked back away from rest, toward a rock. We hope his labor noble, but he is hounded by a Cain–cursed past. Italian, Czech, or Greek, the man is global, clock–faced, best at going first to last. He’ll find some other’s silver, coal, or copper and wish the wilderness were Hollywood western. The prophet of bitter honey and grasshopper, the buckled, grass–devouring Nebuchadnezzar, with his wife forever running to the mine, the kids in tow. She never makes it in time.
Mine Hungry, you call me by your name. Under barbed wire and up arroyos I come crawling, crowbarring old boards from your mouth and wonder. I have the ancient map, a torch, a calling to disinter a treasure. At the surface, before I take my last white breath, I call in like a bat relinquishing its purchase. I follow hunger’s swallow, my fortunate fall through black to gold, my narrow way through myriad prospects of living in the world, when (save for one ascended) even the buried and resurrected man must die again. From darkness, you call me yours, for words, worth earth. You call me in: Lazarus come forth.
John Poch A smaller Jackson Pollock, my polar blues in cursive curse and scratch. A wasted fire to write myself lies scribbled, smolders. Moods instead of house–high flames’ emotion mire a vision. Ink, they lie. I thought my title clever at first: my name on every tongue. For days I pooled, cooled, and dried, lay stifled. The sticks of spite, coyote bones I slung at others, stir my wreckage, violin me. A ghost town’s last home in my chair—my lap foundation and the rest extinguished chimney— I hover above my sonnet, my handicap apparent, arson on the brain, and practice denying my death, patient as practice practice.
Naming a Child A dozen scaled quail weave their worried patter through the sage brush to our back porch. I cluck and the lookout mother on the bush looks up, the chicks scatter. An orange wasp mauls passionately the spearmint flowers. An old story, the birds and bees come to summer. Waking just an hour ago, I watched you shift within your mother’s belly in the morning sun like someone kneading dough from inside out, awkwardly comic but sacramentally tragic in your work, your play. On the stage of the wet desert dust, this humble mud, did the blood–bright sun wake you and, with last night’s brief rain, make you something new like an adobe church whose rounded buttresses breathe, shine, and shadow in the first long light?
How can I write of ghost towns and mining when there are clouds that look like fat horses leaping from the mountains? I know the hands of old men trembled when whole gold nugget buddhas like tiny babies tumbled from the quartz veins in these mountains, but the blonde tufts of those quail and the hunger of the wasp shine now. Little actor, play within a play, body at the center of a body, nearly mythic beloved of mine and heaven and the birds between, I am your audience applauding. My prayer: turn toward the light the same as you will turn toward your name.
Colophon Ghost Towns of the Enchanted Circle was set in Adobe Jenson Pro font and printed on a Vandercook Proofing Press. Each text section of the book was printed on archival paper using handset type. The images were printed on Arches Infinity rag paper. Layout , Typesetting and Design by Ryan Burkhart and Larry Cooper. The book was printed by Ryan Burkhart and Larry Cooper with the assistance of Amber Hand. Larry Cooper of Gardyloo Handmade Books designed the binding of the book and hand–bound the entire edition. This is book ______ of an edition of 35.
Ryan Burkhart
John Poch
Acknowledgments: The Paris Review: “February Flu”; “The Ghost Town”; “Red River” Western Humanities Review: “Baldy”; “Cimarron”; “E-Town” Sewanee Theological Review: “Dawson” John Poch would like to thank Texas Tech University for a Research Enhancement Fund grant that contributed to the making of these poems. Ryan Burkhart would like to thank the Board of Flying Horse Editions, UCF Art Department, his alma mater, Texas Tech University, and Joe Arredondo. This book is copyright protected, 2006. No portion of this book may be reproduced without the kind written permission of the Flying Horse Editions/H2O Graphics, John Poch and Ryan Burkhart.