This interview with Marfa Book Co. owner Tim Johnson, posted yesterday on Poetry magazine's excellent blog, made me wish I'd known about the shop when I was through there a few years ago. Finding a great independent bookstore in the desert is a heady combination I've written about before.
And because I love a good geographic theme, an old poem I have been doing some new tinkering with:
Outside Marfa
Scrub the lives we have had
to now, let the skirmish
of details slither off into
the reaches. For the last
hundred miles it has seemed
unimportant to carry on with this
mastery of the ambitions we've
been telling ourselves we are about.
Let's lie flat and let the wideness
we've funnelled into so many straight
days and weeks loose to bloom
a moment into this sky.
As far as the eye knows
this day and where we lie is all
and who is the eye to deceive?
Now whatever stray reluctance left
on the part of the mind is slipping
off as the sky looms back,
and life till now buckles, slain,
and washes out across West Texas.
Hear, the car has ceased its
cricket ticking, last trace
of how we got here silenced,
and now who am I to say?
