Charles Hood
Basin and Range
Sometimes when I go to Nevada I have lunch with Michael Heizer, share ideas about time management, how to get things finished. We have maybe a salad, drink iced tea. Mostly we laugh about all the people who are not Michael Heizer.
Interstate 80, always good for names in brine spelled by rocks. Look, I see yours. Nose cones at the missile display slant; each one (one hopes) inert. Friday night: a sign for loose slots and tribal police under it, radar gunning the parade of drunk johns.
Once I found a cave with 50 airplanes (it was a big cave)—Spitfires, Corsairs, a Messerschmitt 109. I only fly them at night, contrails silver in moonlight. Outside Salt Lake City a plaster Jesus spoke to me, told me to stop lying, or else, like the miracle of loaves and fishes, He would make me multiply, create thousands and thousands of me, hold a wedding, let them eat me past my bones.
Why is it nobody in the Bible ever needs to say, Wait, I have to hit the head, nobody gets tired of growing up in some loser Galilee town and says, That’s it, I am joining the Centurions, getting out of this dump. I was hassled by police while hitchhiking to Albuquerque. God bless the Navajo in the pickup who pulled over, said, It’s all right officer, he’s with me. I tried to thank him,
he just waved like I was a horse fly, said, I hate white people—I just hate cops worse. Scrim of juniper under dim rain on the horizon. Hum of good tires. Hours passed, then he asked, You heard of this new kid, Rosanne Cash? How easy it all seemed. Even Jack Kerouac made sense. I once saw five open range signs in a row
without a single bullet hole in them, not one. American West just goes and goes. A place like a door handle: hot, metal, smooth. Mostly hot. Like waiting. A place just like most other places, except not them, even a little bit. Like the sound of a car door being shut, solid whunch as it closes, locks,
is done. To this day pronghorn are still curious. Pioneers, to attract them, waved a flag on the end of a long pole, shot them when they came close. Like the name of every person you have ever met who has already forgotten you. Like the v-shaped stone fences the Shoshone built
to harvest pronghorn. Like hubcaps. Like the words anvil cloud, bomb bay, drone flash: like a pillar of fire: like truck stop coffee: like the raised bed of railroads from 1869, rails now gone, ties dry in the sage. Like the first car you ever hated with all your heart. Like road salt and borrow pit. Like thinking about how smart I would be if I had been reading books all those times
instead of just fucking around. Like wide shots in the movies. Like that time in the cafe in Cairo, I wanted some salt, it came in a white dish, a little pile of it, with a spoon. Basin and range landscapes like that saucer of salt: like the beauty of very broken small pieces of glass:
like a car crash:
like a slap:
like this: