Let me confess my hatred
For the bare rock walls of these mountains
And the tinder-dry dead grass prickling at the horizon.
These recent hallucinations I've been having
All involve me, a car, and a new life in some
Big city to the east.
My first best friend said I could have
Her old Chevrolet and two gallons of gas.
She got married last fall to the sheep farmer up north
And she'll never get out of this place.
But I guess that's fine with her.

The worst thing I ever did as a child was spy on my brother as
He dripped acid onto a butterfly and watched its wings
Melt away, decaying, cancerous, like cotton candy.
I was always too chicken to go try it myself.
To tell the truth, I've always been too scared to do much myself.
But this time when my sister begged me not to go, I told her
It was my turn to be stupid, and I packed my underwear,
Kissed the dog, and drove off in a glorious cloud
Of red and ochre dust.

But now the Chevy's engine has sputtered and died
By the millpond nearly grown over with dead grass, as
Another storm is moving across Meadow Canyon
Toward Calloway Butte and I wondered if my sister hadn't been right after all.
Getting out of the car, I stared at the sky, watching the ugly clouds
Before I bent down in the coffee-colored clay, and lifted
The mummified vertebra of an animal covered with flecks of mud.

Still, there is the strange intimacy of clouds, the rain,
The pink anemones nodding to the beat of the rising wind.
In the distance, two female elk were grazing
Near a stand of pines, under wet shafts of sunlight upon mildewed pine sap.
As the rain hit with a suddenness that startled even them,
They froze, living statues in a curtain of water droplets,
Before bounding off to find a hiding place.
I watched them go.

They say the anemone is the flower of death,
But this is worse than death, I think:
Trapped between canyon walls,
My life and soul just another skeleton in the mud.
But sometimes that's how it goes. I think I'll sit here
On the hood of my Chevy in the rain
And see if I can't wait it out.



----------------------------------------------------------------------
I wrote this as a project for one of my English classes in college. We were supposed to take a 4-line poem and add specified plot devices and phrases to it and transform it into our own poem. I think this really turned out well, but I suppose I can't take full credit for it, since my English teacher supplied some of the phrases and the original poem wasn't mine.

Here is the original:

Waiting it Out
Another storm is moving across Meadow Canyon
Toward Calloway Butte
I bent down in the coffee-colored clay, and lifted
The mummified vertebra of an animal covered with flecks of mud
There is the strange intimacy of clouds, the rain.
In the distance, two female elk were grazing
Near a stand of pines, under wet shafts of sunlight.

-- Anonymous