Set Me Down

I Drove this road
A thousand times
And never stopped
But I wanted to stop
Wanted to drop
My boot heel
In the dust right here

Where everything else
Is a hundred miles away

From that greasy joint
At the side of the road
Where they take your last buck
Just cause they got you
Just cause the Flyin’ J
Is a hundred miles away
Up past the horizon’s mirage

Silver all a shimmer
That never lets you stay

I still want to give ’em
My only last dollar
For a dusty tin cup
Of black coffee
A bit of leaf for my briar
And watch the rest fly right by there
A hundred miles from anywhere

As they look for somethin’
I already found along my way

Left my heart in the dust
On a ribbon of a road to nowhere
You’ll still find my shadow there
Back broken, knees bent
Bent as my soul
That fell seven years ago
Into a cool well at a secret spring

Under a crooked cross on a holy dune
A million miles away

Look in my hands
See this dust
Take my bones
These lonely bones
And cover them up
With this

Don’t play me a dirge
Let the heat waves shimmer-dance
On my bones
On these sticks and groans
Just let the wind fiddle
A lonely tune round the cholla
On my bones

On these lonely bones
Just let the desert play

There’s a burnt ravine
Tween Hatch
And the brass of the Tucson sky
Out in the saddle-sore gulches
And wind-beaten scrub so dry
When I get too old
Take me on that long road

Till I can’t walk no more
Then set me down

On a hot rock
Under the old creosote
With the lizards and cicadas
The sun burnin’ my jeans up
My lips chapped, crinkled as a crone
As these crows’ feet in a squint
Let me taste that coppery dust

One last time let me just
Breathe it into these bones

Let my last sight be
A dust devil dancin’
Those darned quail a-skitterin’
And the mourning doves
Up on the lines above
Serenadin’ me
In peace while I lay

In the grit of a forgotten wash
A hundred miles away

At high noon
When the sun is blazin’
Burnin’ up the long long sands
Put my sweet girls in my hands
Put your cool kiss on my cheek
Don’t cry, I wanted it this way
And leave me here to stay

So far from anywhere.
A hundred miles away

__________________________________
Originally posted June 5, 2010

Last will and testament. If it won’t work out as written, put the ashes under that tree, please. The rest? Proceed as directed.

So You’re Telling Me…

Sir, you are mistaken
The science deserves your alms
Your faith is misplaced
And I wonder at your psalms

Scientifically speaking
The world is in place
And the trees Grow and burn 
and return on the earth's face

And men are men
They live and breathe
They hurt and they make
With sharpened swords and intricate weaves

The Christ you cherish
Lived and died bleeding
He walked again
Scientifically speaking

So why this sudden curse
Of all that you confess
Saying it's all a lie
That suddenly the spirit denies the rest 

The Artist Who Speaks

These works deepen,
the beauty deepens to beauty,
the first audience seeks the second
and the final
God Himself
spoke and then
saw it was good
created His own audience
that He might revel
in the revelry in
response to His
own art

These things are ephemeral
that drive us to roar
in our place
before His sustainment
yet long for the day
when the final concert
the final gallery
is open for eternity
no longer annual
perennial
but eternal
in the Garden
recreated

It all remains,
spans the scope
of time and space,
begotten in His begetting
before everything
yet in a sort
of event horizon
came to a point
a shout, a roar
of finality
that seems like an ending
in the text
that opens up everything
into motion and view

As His son,
His Very Revelation
of Himself
with Himself
made our gallery
our beautiful gallery
and us within it
crying out at our wondrous frame
and our wondrous foil
our perilous fall
our precious restoration
to recall again our fearful making
that which we are
because of
and in
Him who is the most glorious
never made
ever being
revealed
for our pleasure
that is His pleasure.