American Dream (Poem)

Nancy Davis Rosback, McDowell Mountain Regional Park

Scottsdale, Arizona, February 2011

© Nancy Davis Rosback Used With Permission

American Dream

   [T]he survival information is encoded 
     in the grammar of the language.
     ~ Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge*

The desert is the obstacle,
and he who knows runs both

hot and cold, with and against
the coyotes standing ground

for the drop-off, hungry to collect
what earth-toned hands might

press into night's gloved palms.
Where the rattler sings

to a slip of moon, words
spin silence their companion,

steps between arroyos leaving
no before, no after, the land

absorbing the heat of bodies bent
on making it, the accident of birth

what makes the choice so easy.
Build a wall west to east, stretch

the wire barbed with the scent
of men secreting in a thicket

of prickling cactus, measure
their time at risk by the whiteness

of bones they've blessed in passing.
Trickle become flood, they come, still,

this land the one for a reason,
that land their call to home.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas
________________________________

Special thanks to photographer Nancy Davis Rosback for permission to use this image from her recent travels in Arizona. To see more of Nancy's wonderful work, visit a little somethin'.

* Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquois Ledge (Viking 2010), p. 46.

"Coyotes" is slang for those who, for a price, smuggle the undocumented across the Mexican-U.S. border. A kind of survival guide for those making the crossing warns against coyotes, polleros [literally, chicken herders], and pateros [duck herders]. A New York Times post on the guide is here.

I offer this poem for this week's "One Shot Wednesday" event at One Stop Poetry, which each week invites poets to share and read each other's work. Be sure to visit the site late Tuesday afternoon and every Wednesday for links to the many contributors' poems.