Self-Portrait as Interstate 10

Still, the sky is the great equalizer.
Still, I yawn into the visible: yellow sun,
shack, mountains of uncertain
range. What gives life
are two directions: to and away like a decisive
heart. The saguaros wave
in the way of surrendering bankers.

What is it to be a sign, a coffee cup,
the grave of a doll's discarded leg?
I end, I begin, I have known death
and have doubled back. I am the last
gas station on its three stilts rising
out of the sea, or the child born there.

To hear the ocotillo burst
into white laughter after rain.
To be the keeper of distances,
defined by landscape and trash.
To the foal of cows in spring
and the crossing corpses of Texas,
I say, Come unto me. Leave.

Here a cross marks the earth
where three sisters have buried
their animal. Here the dung of a beast
grows sweet to dry in the sun.
To know not night,
but the fading of a lamp. To live
the constant grey of a bayou.

And here, in L.A., here, in Florida,
here in Lake Charles,
towers of sulphur flicker and that hell
singes its lit I's against the good
white clouds. Here swamp, bay,
monument, tin can with a mouth
ragged as a Southern woman and I
am her spine pressed to the bedsheet.

There is no home, only postcards.
No relationship not marked by distance.
Of all things, I am the same

photograph taken at different
times of day: me, the lyric
of truck tires in a deluge or
me, those years of dark
water in a plant's heart or

me, that small animal
blooming in a hawk's fist
not drowning, not waving,
but falling out of the sky.