Gareth Reeves
Central Valley, California
I drive my appurtenances,
slant-six and battered body,
my headlights out of whack —
but it’s not night now —
my raucous Plymouth, bent
and patched-up piece of America,
into this desert valley.
The antenna shakes as the wheels
judder over the cracked tarmac.
The broken-down radio, its loose connections jumping,
bursts into life, goes dead, and bursts again
into a Savings and Loan ad, ‘guaranteed
federally up to forty-thousand’,
then a baroque sonata.
I drive past mountains
bristling on the skyline with dead trees,
hillocks in the foreground
stippled with browns and greys,
past tentacular roots sticking out of the sand
and rocks wind-tortured into fat
birds, faces of old men, noses, a hand:
a bomb-site in the sun’s equal glare,
a landscape ravaged by the eye.
There should be ghosts here
and I try to see them:
of pioneers, of gold-prospectors;
and of those who stalked invisible paths,
ghosts of a ghosted race, with whom I share
too little of their trampled rituals.
But it’s no good,
even the word ‘ghost’ seems out of place;
No one is here.
Unreal America spreads its wave-bands
over a desert air.
My alien eye
conjures a violence from nowhere.
Page(s) 38
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