Wichita Mountains Ghazal 

How do you write a place? Maps have no sky, no wildlife, no rocks.

Hiking trails, thin twine unfurled, can’t be seen from above. The rocks 

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you hop will take you nowhere but up over the plains, boulders

weathered and spheric, and you will see the west can’t be won. Walk 

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back down the valley till the sight of Fort Sill isn’t. Like the

mountain boomer sprawling a gash on the forehead of a rock, 

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its golden face distracts the fools, pollen drunk bees bumbling to burst

veins, pock hills with shafts, and strew tailings of split orange rock, 

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but no one can mine the soul from this bone. Wooly old scrub-jays

chatter at their mud nests. In springtime, post artillery rocks 

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blue thrush eggs from a red elm. In summer, the heat bares warped

fangs, fester of a diamondback sunning coiled between the rocks, 

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and the bombs go off and the boys huzzah and the bombs go

off. If the west can’t be won, then they’ll take the east, bringing Iraq 

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Team Sill Oklahoma Pride and craft beer. In the valleys, all this war is

forgotten, all but the plastic soda bottles stashed in rocks. 

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If you dare to write a place, write its trash with all its glory,

You can’t hide the truth in open sky; shards of a miner’s crock 

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sing it glistening from a creekbed’s debris. It’s an old rage,

so tense that it almost looks still, bison watchful, hard as rock.