Western Ways

The simple-minded interstates have it now, and the motel-

and-filling-station towns: Holiday Inn, Best Western,

Quality, with Gulf and Texaco: the clean featureless

caravanserais: gas pools good beds sanitary

indifferent food. Oh yes, but beyond and outside lie

not only reservations and actual ranches but also

that special little town of the plains, at intervals strung on

the gleaming straightaway of the tracks. First seen miles

off,

green smudge, white silos at the southern edge, and the

northern

marker of the water tower: Hays Russell Kit Carson:

oasis groves in the grasslands dropped there out of the

nineties.

Yes but sometimes the cruel flow-ways have passed them,

leaving

a once proud road now secondary; coarse grass and

broken

windows and festering boards, decay without circulation,

stare at us in squalid reproach, at us, the suburban

passers-through on our way from urban to coastal urban.

We might have lived another life by the silo and water

tower.

Sometimes in the great desert the Greeks imagined

Atlantis.