LOLLIE BUTLER
I can never sleep without a fix on the stars,
those strangers two flights up crossing toward X.
Orion stares down as though he expects us to revolt,
roll off the planet into his domain.
Perhaps that’s our fate—
to be screwed into the sky—40-watt bulbs—
never knowing what the big sign reads.
This is a city I create each night, as I walk out,
new arguments of traffic, sirens breaking glass
in the universal dream, strange dogs barking
at me from the other side of chainlink.
Clouds hang loose and late from Denver,
L.A., Phoenix. City smoke adds
to the glow like a wrangler’s cigarette
before he swaggers on.
Not far to the south of these oil-smacked streets,
the desert begins in earnest;
not just potted cholla at the all-night station
selling gas, beer and air—all we need to flare
like a pitched matchstick.
Somewhere a mine shaft exhales
its coppered breath, a ghost town
line of fence posts picks the wind’s teeth
and a nightjar settles on a rusted wagon wheel
going nowhere
under this come-lately light
where time was squandered panning for a dream
west of everything.
Beyond these mountains, out of freeway lights,
Hohokam fire rings sink deeper into the earth
while well-intending anthropologists
toothbrush the crumbs of time.
Intent and futility keeps civility intact, dawn
and dawn again and I am sealed
inside an envelope of now,
the now of impending rain;
of this neighborhood crumbling
like announcements of last month’s yard sales
tacked to the poles,
The now of my father’s breathing machine—
so many beats to the measure
but not the least bit poetic—as he rises
on one weak elbow to give up
in fits of coughing the smoky years of his life.
Let the all-night prowl car and the insomniac cross paths
and let the black cat scale the wall to safety,
let the woman ease back into childhood,
whispering into her father’s good ear
the only starry lullaby
she can remember.
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