Author: Jeremy Ray Jewell

heads will roll and tongues will lash
before words capitulate

posthaste pressed to the sea and isle
William, pale and trembling

sits on the obsequious throne of the West
and burning town

William, pale and trembling.
Let he who has understanding understand:

And he found a woman who likes country music
in the bow-legged line doubled over and curled

’round inside the sultry family court when
the bailiff told them to close their ranks and

he grabbed his belt buckle and made as if to
do the Electric Slide. William. Pale. Trembling.

And fifteen years later, back in the same
old kitchen of death, drips from cutting boards

and mouse traps into the fiddles and dandelions
of our far away countries ever under our feet

and William, pale and trembling, delights in
the fear, in the passages of Isaiah worn on

matching t-shirts in a shopping mall crosswalk
that he who has understanding may understand:

The Ramblers called it: In remembrance of things
to come. In expectation of old acquaintance.

William, pale and trembling, obsequious throne
of the West, the burning town. We all

cheated death. When will we
deserve it?

and up jumped the devil
up jumped the devil

Junkyard’s got more stories than
a battlefield.

What they wouldn’t tell us
is how the cost of towing in an Econoline
or any van for that matter
would be more than the value of the sum
of its parts.

Hop lil junkyard pup, not
gone ask for mo or less
baby could be a tangled wreck
and the vehicles be cute
“don’t touch it,” you warn.
I frown.

So since they wouldn’t tell us
they would pretend to check a spreadsheet
while scrolling through bills of lading
or they would ignore us and let us
stroll right through.

“Hey bossman, how much fer dis here
bit uh brain?” Ha. “I can get it off
with a screwdriver.” Ha ha
and boy, that kabob musta taken
a log off the back of a flatbed.

Junkyard’s got more stories than
a battlefield.

How many dirt daubers they got in that
wheel well? How many rattlesnakes in
that Tioga? What we gone piece tagether
newly minted?

“I don’t like the look of it.
I don’t like the man at the shop.
I don’t like the snakes in the grass.
More red flags than a Chinese military parade,”

It will be fine, I say.
It will be old before it is new,
and it will make old new again.
Old and new be the pieces in the overgrowth
and time itself become movement’s lubricant.

Goodbye our Western skies
Into the dark American night

What the Mormon Battalion stumbled upon
in the bones of Mountain Meadows unhitched
can’t see the frontier for the horizon
and the Marian apparitions of Felipe Espinosa,
staring closer into nopal spine until vision
goes viscous and the American Oedipus cries,
Indian grave robber pads his own cache,
Goodbye our Western skies.

assassinated governors, gubernatorial assassins,
and the buried alive, because you know there were,
in all the Boot Hills along the Chisholm Trail
what all we built on the campfires of DeSoto
and the cigarette butts of truckers dying anonymous,
tomb of the unknown temperance, child brides raised
in the sovereignty of the fundaments, mystery which
lanced the growth and pulled out the lie until
it walked itself brisk and wide abreast the Union
Pacific, its horrible rapidity and grotesque
animation a blur of the mind of someone’s time,
Goodbye our Western skies.

Goodbye our Western skies
Into the dark American night

And whatever you say we are still here,
and the painted arrows on the red rock canyons
they’re still here, and the Navajo are still
aware of the evil which they could commit, too,
and through it all I’m not sure where to place,
figuratively, the Western skies.
Goodbye.

Now I’m an old hand – I mean, indulge me in this
for the moment – and I am hanging up my hat and
moving into town and running up the rag that’ll
let them all know where I stand where I stand
and that I’m a man who knows my limits, in that sense,
but I’m a man consciously ignorant of the depth
of the mine shafts, filled with bodies. For they
go down farther in my heart than I ever
ever want to know.

Goodbye our Western skies