Walter Bargen

Volcanic Fields

─Albuquerque

Five strands, four points, more straight

Than a crow’s flight─barbed wire’s impeccable logic

Certain as the horizon that it claims.

Boots press a thin soil delicate as flushed larks.

Stunted yucca bristle and charge the blued air.

Leaves honed on a sharp and fatal light.

Scorched earth swallows the single fruit

Of a half-buried prickly pear. Low clumps

Of brittle grass strewn like shattered glass.

There’s the broken box springs of a sleeper

Sailing over the desert, drunk on stars,

The burn out a brief bright scar across fathomless sky.

The tangled nerves of tumbleweed

Struggle to crawl under the lowest

Strand of fence in visions of escape.

Ancient heat, perforated black basalt,

A stone sponge saturated with sun.

Extinct tongue of lava, speechless with

Everything lost and still everything to lose.

Anniversary

The big tomato sandwich, not listed

On the chalkboard menu, threatens

To capsize the plate. You have to make

A special request. She works

The edges of bread and cheese

Searching for a mouth hold.

She wants something special

to immoralize her husband

who will be sixty this year.

Are leather and whips involved,

restraints, wrists and ankles tied

to bedposts or something later,

lighter, and oily.

Or does she want to immemorialize him

with its own conundrums of eraser

and shovel. Or does she wish

to immortalize him,

but there’s one too many golf stories

to allow that to happen.

Yes, he’s known to be a mile wide

and an inch deep but only among his friends.

The others say furlongs and only half-an-inch.

Details and consensus hard to come by.