Equinox At Walker Lake

Pine nut round dance blessing down in Paiute town
all set to begin at the dark of dusk with cottonwoods
crazy in a windstorm, and dust masking each face.
Beaded cradles, oil-bathed bread, tug-of-war, alcohol,
hand-games betting on sticks of bones, drums, and the chants
of elders mixing voices in the buzz and twitter of loudspeakers.

As prelude, out at Walker lake toward sunset—salt,
seagulls, diving ducks, sand, one dead ladybug to match
and oppose the dot of blood on my thumb. Leg limping
lacerated ligament through pink flowers and yellow, resinous
clumps of unidentified stationary plants, a tumbleweed
riveted to the beach, ammunition dump at the far end periplum
with enough power to annihilate the utopian proposition that this
place might be a haven other than an apocalyptic Heaven.

Then, urinating under blue water, a cloud of green algae
shoots a jet-stream through the seamless empyrean.
Antediluvian shadows climb the mountain’s flesh-colored
flank of coagulated earth. Brightly bruised with striating veins
of carmine and white, the rockface mimics a cracked still life.
For this place, it’s possible to say the word, “holiness”,
meaning the shiftless sense of its silence, its emptiness
in the vast preponderance of the 4 elements unmediated
by any outward act of meditation, by any punctuation
out to insert the snake of the sacred into the visibly profane.

Meanwhile, back at the village of Schurz at sundown
everything’s OK, more and more pickup trucks in the lot,
as word gets around it’s time for the circle, the blessing,
time for the distribution of the nuts. Time for the timeless
darkness to crawl across the balance sheet and distribute the stars.