Homecoming, 2006

Doing 65 on Highway 80 heading
down into the depression
through the Apache grasslands
of San Pedro where the cottonwoods
are just right, in line
sucking up all the river has
to offer, spreading and flowing
south to north, it is 96.7 FM
and a country bumpkin sings
along with me since Karen
Carpenter is dead now,
I'm on top of the world
looking down on creation
and the only explanation
I can find, turns into
a dramatic cuatro cinco seis
en la manana en domingo
all the way up to the first hills
where the earth pushed up
on one side and sank down on the other
back into it's the love
that I've found ever since
you've been around, your love's
Ballet Folklorico again with an odd
mix of German Whitesnake coming in
at the junction, static, Tucson recognition.
It's the comfort that amazes
the drivers on the familiar
way here, if it weren't for civilization
it wouldn't be so peculiar.

By the time Johnny Cash comes out
of the nowhere, dominates
the entire damn effort
on the way up the Mule Pass, past
used-to-be Baxter's restaurant, the shrine
right there which marks
the best place to collect misteltoe
from the scrub oak and real oak,
more real than anything until
the tunnel where reception
changes into nostalgia, to Big Bands
compatible with the vintage era
of old Bisbee, old town, old things.
Special. Really special trends
which at this point in history is
investment bankers and softwear
tycoons reproducing America,
Norman Rockwell, all that goes
in that place, that simulacra.
Reproducing us without the flair,
C,S,N & Y top it off at the end,
carries on past the Campbell Shaft
past the Dairy Queen and Whitehead's,
past the Copper Queen hospital
somehow jubilant, somehow not
is where I am, where I can't be
and into the driveway where I stop
and look up to the dumps of hardened dross,
the real dross and there
are wildflowers still in September,
they'll be gone soon. I sit
there to finish the Vietnam
era as the key alarm dings and dongs
and I notice I couldn't hear it
because of 96.7 FM, I just linger
for awhile -
doing the cultural struggle
of the airwaves down here.
The slight breeze bangs on
a screen door, opens and closes
again and again and again, slowly
just like the wind, just like this ghost
monitoring dross and wildflower,
flamenco and twang, on top of creation.
It's a long way home.