Guadalupe Road

Guadalupe Road

She steps down from the dunes,
kicks off her tired shoes -
goes west,
to flirt with the sea
and bed with the moon.
Smooth and serenaded
by maestro mustachios and
cricket choir.
Restless mists adorn her:
Vagrant exhalations of lamp lit lounges and amber toothed arroyos,
a fragrant gauze for wounded desperados.
Her garments go far,
tease the thirst of wild, lonely ranchos,
pale and peeling,
faded enclaves in the night.
Brittle starlight nervous in her presence.
Wingless rivals comb her spine and rake the skies,
incandescent lancers of the worn and hammered path.
And she bears the heavy tread of these
rubber torch processions
with adolescent joy and
effervescent eyes.

Until at last the dawn winds come,
wringing whisper mint sonatas
and vegetable sorceries,
from dangling blades of brooding expat canopies,
as breakfast yolk of hungry day
spills down across the mesa.
Her shoulders are bare now,
her garments gone.
The feminine curves are ripe and roaming,
comely and becoming,
a potent goddess of the highway.
And so she goes.
A seeker of places to fall or be fallen upon,
shameless displayer of precious and volatile things.
Expert collector of rotted rides and castaway plans.
Patron saint of gutter shrines and sugary lines.
Sacred mother of orphan flowers,
tender of sage-rimmed tabernacles,
hoarder of hobo mementos,
cherished and forgotten,
huddled for warmth in her winding, ramshackle gardens.
And so she goes.
Onward, ever onward,
down the truffle-dusted causeway
where the loamy cocoa of the pregnant fields
swirls at her feet.

It's a familiar place.
Where swallows sip from muddy pools
and pickers pick at fleshy jewels.
Where beast and steam have come and gone
and rivers slept and then moved on.
A mountain crumbled here,
an island sank.
A desert bloomed.
Forests fell to grassland,
grassland to the mammoth,
mammoth to the man.
Man the main ingredient
in the clever metal pantries
of automated cooks
with plunging piston hands.
The whittled bone, the common song,
of mythic whores
and marching bands.
The ancients watch and feign surprise,
where a child died
and a lady cries,
a lady
named Guadalupe.