Wasp-waisted, Pony Express monument
leaps angry bronze mount: communicating news
East, hazed across waste
by fatal stone, arrows which rotate
slowly through the heart when they kill.
Is that real? tourist kid, pointing
at leaping pony’s cast gonad:
blistered in summer glare,
No, let’s look at the river.
Spherical beaver, paddlefeet,
mossy. rolls along the bank.
What about that? girl in thong rocks
on idling Jetski, bronze legs wrapped
around housing, cheeks,
flattened on wet vinyl, suggestive of exercise,
No, she is part of something else,
and those immigrants, fishing,
live in old worlds.
Steam boat terminal,
rail museum, rolling up the hill,
pronghorn, boomtown, water cannon, cattle,
timber, obsidian. Alfalfa.
Pioneers lined out, the trail
engraved on rock, kicking up blades,
tire tracks, boot-prints, bones.
Coyote trotting over sunburned foothill
stranded among tuned wire fences,
tracking down the last wild beast,
dead in its tracks.