Western Therapy
When did this first begin to affect you?
The Bering Strait froze over and Mongolians
moved in and now we’re making houses from hay
and planting aspen and imagine a black mountain
of mesquite briquettes and buffalo in freezers.
Did you always feel this way?
This is after that first line to the horizon and the Platte still a victim
of indecision. Before the change in the top twenty feet (not that
we decompose all that differently) when the clouds didn’t feel they had to
look like something, and these water towers like watch stems.
Do you think you’re using your time wisely?
The West waits and is not so much new as in thought: windbreaks
and the absence of passenger pigeons. Contrails and grilling fish.
We will divvy up water and live apart from the Seven Sisters.
What do you want to accomplish?
This will be painted and that will tend to memory. The stars will wander off
disorganized. There will be plates and hot spots. The West will be
somewhere else, and we will too.
Where do you want to go with this?
They will think we were curious (our gods will go with us). They will assume
that we suffered (bones and their belongings). They will say we were optimists
and lived on the shores of the Inland Sea.
(from Faultline)
