POEM: desert guitars

desert guitars
(for Daniel Boling)

approaching Tucson
you couldn’t see the city
just a wide column of light
beaming into the night sky
signaling the weary traveler

I’d awakened that morning
in a trucker’s motel on the
outskirts of Amarillo, Texas

I was driving a tiny Ford Festiva
with an engine like a mosquito
I’d used all the money I had to buy it
when I was kicked out of the house
after my one and only year in college

my little go-cart had a tape deck
but it had broken in Tennessee or Kentucky
so I was scanning the dial for company
I remember I spent a couple hours
listening to an on-air swap meet
from a Navajo reservation

this was as west as I’d ever been
my first time in the desert
and even at night when I couldn’t
see the impossible horizon
or the swallowing sky
I could tell I was on alien ground

like any kid who grows up
watching westerns, I hear guitars
when I see the desert
minor chords like Arabic music
and the fast strumming of the gundown

tonight as the six-string balladeer
sings of blue-corn enchiladas
tierra encantada
I find myself back in that night
heart pounding, hands on the wheel
approaching a column of light
and the new life it promises

5 February 2013
Auburn, AL

/ / /

This poem was inspired by singer/songwriter Daniel Boling. At a performance in Auburn, Alabama, tonight, he said, “Desert guitars in humid country occasionally go ape.” That line started me remembering.