This is my best poem, which is why I wanted to post it. But it captures tension in my marriage, which is why I didn’t want to post it. Marci literally saved my life. Back in November of 1994 I hit rock bottom for reasons I won’t go into here, reasons I’m not even sure I totally understand, and probably can’t explain. Anyway, I spent Thanksgiving night 1994 drunk, wandering up and down Mesa Street in El Paso, screaming “I want to die” at the occasional passing car and cursing God for my life. Somehow I’d become encased in a shell of shyness and couldn’t seem to get out. I blamed God for my inability to be myself around others, especially women.
I woke up the next morning with this strong impression: go home. So, I made plans to move back to Utah after spending 12 crucial teenage and college years away.
Shortly afterward I met Marci, and overall, I’ve been happy ever since. I have two versions of my life: one of deep dissatisfaction and anger and one of general satisfaction and deep joy--life before Marci and life after Marci. She literally rescued me. But no marriage comes without tension. This poem records that tension, and that tension is its strength. However, it’s much easier to share unabashed praises to my wife, and I’ve written many such poems. Yet, good writing often requires doing the hard thing. I have no idea if I will ever become known as poet, but if I do, this is one of the poems I want to be known for:
The New West
7/14/07
Cicadas riot outside the window. Everest on the cot at the foot of our bed sleeps silent.
It is a warm night after an intensely hot day.
Earlier we drove out to investigate the biggest fire in Utah history.
Over 360,000 acres. Deep, rutted roads through soft alkali soil. Neither Lloyd nor I remember these roads this way. You want us to turn around. Winding between high brush.
Finally, first black finger of fire. The print, really. Strikingly manicured, smooth as a golf course, black rolling undulations below craggy black basalt cliffs.
Then a stand of untouched brush and a lone juniper. “One Tree Hill,” you say The Joshua Tree. U2 standing stoic before the shockingly sparse American West, Bono sweating in a white, wife-beater t-shirt. In different places, that album spoke to us. The Edge’s fingers clicking the strings like cicadas in the night. Suddenly searing sounds rip through the atmosphere, bulleting the blue sky. Bono, a mad preacher, snake charmer, symbol of sex, God, America. And you give yourself away, and you give… Until, like an Arizona monsoon, the thunderheads rolled on. Somehow I ended up forty and married.
At some point we stopped. Lloyd, the boys, Darth and I hiked up a volcano. It irritates me that you remain behind. Love is that way. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
A spoiled brat I insist you meet me inside myself where it’s impossible.
One hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit. Heat rises in thick waves off charred grass and heat-polished, volcanic bombs.
The lone, silt covered van sits with you hidden inside, the size of an ant, at the edge of a chalk-white stripe etched across a broad, black valley, two isolated fires still smoldering in the distance.
One wide, like a dust storm.
The other narrow as the funnel of a small tornado.
I can’t live without you.
7/22/07
Sunday, the day of rest.
I nearly nap on the living room floor after church, dinner and a late afternoon thunder storm.
Cool evening.
I sit at a round table under the swaying colored lights of the patio of the Blue Door Bar,
which we made together, for me,
in memory
of wilder nights and days blurred like smoky dusk following a fire.
Margarita glasses now filled with milkshakes.
Our boys sit at the black-tiled bar under blinking martini light playing cards with Elvis on the back.
Lennon is on the t-shirt on the wall in his guerilla suit.
Crickets chirp.
I walk up the lane to visit Mom.
Deep smell of cool wet woods.
Afterwards, I grab a flashlight and walk down in the canyon loud with life. Cicada, cricket. The night breathes after a short, intense rain.
Tomorrow there will be heat, dust, struggle against drought again.
7/27/07
Cool shade of cottonwood,
Chalk Creek churning,
over worn stone, singing
the same song over thousands of years.
Sunlight on boulders the size of over-stuffed chairs down to the size of ladies purses.
Deep reds,
pale blues,
rounded by the roll of ages.
Turbulent creek-beds during spring run-off.
What if global warming ends the snow-pack,
ends the annual rock toss downstream?
No more high waters cutting into banks,
bringing down trees, piling up crud?
No more silt and shit
beautifully backed up behind log jamb
to fill in with meadow
and cottonwood
and birds singing?
What if the seasons of the west end
and the song of the crashing creeks
goes silent?
What then will be our song?—
You and I colliding
--Indian Mormon and White Agnostic Mormon—
Begetting children here
among these rattlesnakes and song birds?
Will our family go on here
after Dry Creek cuts
through our land dry forever?
© Steve Brown, 2012
Extra: Click here for Video of U2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ye8GLPUVsM
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