Whose land is this? Where did they go?

Be warned these words are heavy with the baggage of misrepresentation. I am a stranger in my own country. This place is a desert and I should not be here.

She told me she lived here She told me she worked the night shift at Walmart. That her customers at 2 AM are all meth heads and assorted addicts. She told me "I asked one guy, 'Sir, can I help you find something? You've been shopping for nearly two hours.'" He turned to her and said, “No. I’m just really lonely.” She laughed because neither of us found it funny.

What I have told you has always been true. What I have to tell you now is that this world is about to end. This earth is cockeyed...of course men are the last to know...even with their machines...sometimes it seems that one has to lean into the wind to stand straight. Some people...will never know how pleasant it is to be distant in a clean rain, the driving rain of a summer storm. It’s not like you’d expect, nothing like you’d expect. Maybe it is just summer disguised. Maybe it is winter again. Silence lay like water on the land. There, at dawn, you can feel the silence. It is cold and clear and deep like water. It takes hold of you and will not let you go. With all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape. Nature has got the start of you here. a country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants. It was almost too great for the eye to hold, strangely beautiful and full of distance Loneliness is an aspect of the land. the landscape made human. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. That’s the secret of the place, you have to put your hands in the mud. History’s in the mud, in the earth. We all make history serve our needs... He was old and had seen most of everything. How many generations does it take to lose the stories of creation? With the stories she was able to assemble powerful forces flowing from the spirits of ancestors. Strands of the past return to haunt us; the past is never dead. There were hundreds of years of blame that needed to be taken by somebody. The past is written and recited, not remembered. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He might have filmed it, but his memory was much more dependable. The memory was more real than the experience. There was no longer any perspective in his memories But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together. The real past is in the mirror. The real came from stories. The real world in stories. That night, the future troubled nobody. He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. Your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. Sacred time is always in the Present. We are trapped in the now. He was separated from a world he pretended to understand, and now he was dead in his own stories. He let his dreams tell his stories for him. The dreams had been terror at loss; at something being lost forever; but nothing was lost; all was retained between the sky and the earth, and within himself. He had lost nothing. And he was transported from this story to the next. His survival was determined by the stories he remembers at the treeline. We have forgotten how to hear and when to surrender to nature and their stories. This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going. A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. Poetry was as strong as love. See and hear the real stories behind the words, the voices of the animal in me, not the definitions of the words alone. This is a shadow, a chance not a word. Something is going on there in the shadows. I hear to see, And got lost in my own wilderness of words.

He told me if I can’t find god in this country, I won’t find him anywhere else. I want to ask him why god must be always so grandiose. Cause up close, I find god In the eyes of a horny toad Basking in the middle of a road He has claimed as his own. But he’s right in a way, I can see God was here long before the missionaries.

The cottonwoods their naked roots Cascading over banks of Time Make me ashamed of The stumps I drag behind me. It’s been five lifetimes since These roots were home. I find myself infantilized Sucking from a bottle, looking for cover as I climb over mother Earth so dry it flies with the wind And the line between sky and Dirt blurs my vision And I inhale the land As best I can.

Bones fall into the landscape Like sand through the center Of a circular, cyclical hour glass And chronology tempers To the bend of the land. We will never understand As do those who are of this place That we stand on a landscape built from the top – down By the sculpting hands Of an ocean still inherent In the endless dry horizons. Whose land is this? Where did they go? This place is a desert And I should not be here.