Santa Fe Trail

I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched where the westerly winds and the traveler’s checks the evensong of salesmen the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases where no one speaks English. I go separately It is the wind, the rubber wind when we brush our teeth in the way station a climate to beard. What forks these roads? Who clammers o’er the twain? What murmurs and rustles in the distance in the white branches where the light is whipped piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard? I go separately We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice She is coming toward us like a session of pines in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen, O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers whose wagon is perilously rapt.