UPDATE!
More from Roden Crater
More on Roden Crater
More on Chris Cogburn
****
Carrying a drum up a tunnel to the sunset, nothing is adequate to communicate the experience of awe except poetry.
We could have taken pictures or videos or I could write about what happened in the most precise prose, but nothing would come close.
The tunnel.
The light.
The cool air and the sound.
My whole life I’ve felt this way, but only every so often does an experience overwhelm so completely as to obliterate all other modes of communication except poetry.
Thank you, light.
Thank you, James Turrell.
Thank you, poetry bus.
Chris Cogburn at Roden Crater [5:10m]:
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UPDATE!
More from Phoenix
From the Arizona Republic
From Stamped and Metered Flying Fish
****
On the way to Phoenix from Gallup, we stopped the bus for a bathroom break in Arizona at an ostrich farm off of old Route 66 (now I-40) where Gazelle, the kinky haired proprietor, told us the bathroom didn’t work, but we could look around at the ostriches and feed them if we wanted.
Gazelle looked seriously at me when she spoke, probing my face with her deep brown eyes.
“Everybody’s a poet?” she asked.
“Yep,” we said, “everybody’s a poet.”
She walked us over the ostriches with cups of grain pellets.
If you don’t know, feeding an ostrich is like sticking your hand into a ceiling fan, if the ceiling fan blade looks like Burgess Merideth.
We timidly fed these creatures and they nipped at our hands with their bony beaks and rolled their eyes back into their heads as they did it.
Can you feel me shivering?
“How fast can you run?” Gazelle asked me.
“Pretty fast,” I said, shaking scattered pellets out of my hair.
“You wanna ride one?” she asked, “I have a saddle that’s perfect for your skinny ass.”
I looked around at all the grinning poets and then I looked at the bus. Did I want to ride an ostrich?
“Sure,” I said, “I could ride an ostrich.”
“Well, if you fall off the ostrich they will peck you and kick you until you’re dead,” she said.
“Dead?” I said.
“Dead,” she said, “you got anyone back home who can bury you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Well okay then,” she said, “come on” and we walked over to the adolescent male ostriches looming with their gnarly heads over the chicken wire fence.
“You just hold tight around the neck and if you fall off you gotta run as fast as you can away from them,” she said, “ or they will kick (here she mimed kicking) and peck (here she mimed pecking) you until you are a dead one.”
I thought about it a little more and began emptying my pockets of change and pens. I took my hat off and my sunglasses.
“I think I can do it,” I said.
All the poets had grins stuck on their faces.
“Are you sure you want to do this,” Matthew asked.
However this happens, I thought, I’m going to get hurt.
“Sure,” I said, “it’s okay.”
“Okay?” Gazelle asked and grabbed my hand.
“Okay,” I said.
She looked me in the eye and held it for a moment. And then she started laughing.
“I can’t let you ride no ostrich,” she laughed, “an ostrich would kill you.”
I looked up at one ostrich head bobbing over the fence and then I read Gazelle a poem.
I think she liked it okay.
UPDATE!
More from Santa Fe
****
A coyote and a catfish across the Rio Grande seen from a mineral bath in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico and then on to Santa Fe.
We welcomed Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on to the bus this evening, two poets involved in a collaborative project made specifically for their time on the bus.
Jen Bervin writes fully about the project over at the Poetry Foundation (link to the Southeast), and I would love to hear from anyone with thoughts about their process and execution (especially anyone who hears any of the performances).
After the reading, we drove into the night to stay at El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico where we split the troops between the bus and one or two of the “all nice rooms” there, and then up for a crappy breakfast (I had some “Navajo Herbal Tea,” which featured the Navajo herb chamomile) and a beautiful drive through the desert.
Stephanie Young, Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover, Jen Hofer [3:17m]:
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