Afghan Rose

photo by Jesse O.

She whispered,

“Frosted petals, winter linens.  
Barnwood lining, cream quality.”

An Afghan rose pushes the sky one last time, 
burdened by water. 

Taos memory, 
Muse of the Southwest.  
Pilgrimage cemetery in the park.  
Penitente heart, penitente wind 
crying in a cottonwood grove.   
Bark magnetized,   
toothy taste for the gods.  
Dog’s collar, bleached white bones.  
Disco dance under broken bourbon glass 
      trinkets and tin, 
         spinning
               slivers of silver December light.  
Icons of yarn and nip, 
      paperback strips 
         stuck in the sweet grass.  
The sky windblown gray.  
Solar radio (101.9) hum, 
a cougar crosses the sidewalk 
looking for water.  
Old man's face a walnut
or cottonwood bark.
Old Man River cold and low 
but the water boils from a skinny dipping spring.  
“A Love Supreme”.       

Her voice, the cat’s meow, the Red River falling above Questa.  Up canyon, pine bough strings strum.  Her wind sings.  His colorless dreams, white on black.  Snow falls on great-grandmother’s raven coat.  He prayed the snow would kiss desert lips in December.  Prayer answered.  High on the mountain - nieves penitentes pointing dead fingers to the noonday sun. 

His Russian pocket watch keeps no time.  
Just to remember this place by.  
The vulgarity of clocks, 
burden of drifting time, 
heavy as water.

Over yonder in Kabul skeletons creep to the radio tower.  Refugees returned with nothing on their backs but sacks of adobe bricks.  Nothing but the poppies grow, this dreadful drought.  Someday the rain’s gonna fall, washing them all back down.  Bricks, bones, riverbed clog.    

They speak our language but we can’t speak theirs.  They sound so different but they all look the same.  Disposable clothes.  American hoodie hegemony.    

Solar radio on the high plain then descent into faint metallic static of cutbank shadows, the white noise of flowing water and fog running low.  A magpie sings to her lover undercover canopy of cottonwood, tail above nest.  Water low before the melt, river grass still except for a single blade twitch.  Cutthroat trout.      

Afghan boys stacking sand bags all day.  
Ugandan guards, Kalashnikovs 
slung like gunmetal guitars.  
The insider threat is real 
as he smokes the Serbians dance 
to his Texas country blues.  
Sun shining, nose red, 
tobacco cowboy's rough 
as the lizard boots he’s wearing.    

Thanksgiving came and went.  It should be his favorite holiday, but like attending mass it comes with a sense of irony.  His favorite days are all those in-between, forgotten by history’s economic calendar, like today.  He feels irony about Christmas although different.  But this year Christmas bourbon, sleeping bag on the patio, sparrows in the snow.  O he’ll never forget to hang the lights again.

Every evening a pinch of Afghan dust to the wind.  Looking down at all the layers between.  Pretty soon all he’ll have to do is look to the west as the sun sets.  

This is the end, he’s leaving.  On a high desert plain framed by blue mountains, a beginning.