Werner, Hanksville

Werner, Hanksville from Vimeo.

By now, we have forgotten what we thought we came for

But here, in the high desert, what we find is a boneyard, of sorts
A museum of curiosities. A wunderkammern, so to speak.

Articulated and frozen in arc-welded postures
Lovingly, painstakingly static.
Who has made all this?
Lo and behold, here, just as in our own, fleshy menagerie,
We find God, as it were, away on business
Having left us with the proverbial watch on the heath.

In her place, quasi-religious aphorisms
Ranging from word salads of self-actualization slogans, to scriptural runes, mystical cosmovisions
And laminated against the ravages of weather and time
They dangle, as though to say
“this is the thing, implacably silent
but this is what it would speak to you
were it on a cosmic book tour
or propped up in front of a cannabis dispensary.”

All these Devonian lizards, crocodilians, avian reptiles, coelacanths
Some of our first vertebrate ancestors.

Across the street, their descendants now, we congregate
Sunburned and squinting
At Stan’s Burger Shack
We unrack hoses and refill the tanks
Of extended-cab pickup trucks
Harnessed to these are the pleasure boats, glittering with pearlescent finishes
Like that of bowling balls, or flame decals in mother-of-toiletseat resin inlay.

Standing in the afternoon daylight, pump running
With the very essence of ancient forests and sea beds
Distilled and decanted over millions of years
We pause in these fumes of petroculture oblivion.

Hose still running, the dials counting up, and higher up
We order, for the road, a pistachio malted milkshake.

But, something whispers, not entirely forgotten:
These grimacing specters of primer and rust
Reclaimed wreckage and the detritus of our road-world.
This road that now calls us onward to some place
We don’t know, we have never seen.