FOOL’S GOLD

The sun is setting. There is nothing new. Dust on your hands. Hawk in the air. The sun is setting. This is something old. Grass between your lips. Meat on the road. The sun is setting. It forms an emotion. A shape in mind. Dark on the hills. The sun is setting. Eyes squinting in thought. Cars afar humming low. The radio broken still. The sun is setting. You walk inside it. Nobody is watching you. This will not end.

The past, they say, is under our feet. It is what holds us up. That is why we cannot get to it again. The future, on the other hand, is always within reach. See that old sign out there? What you see of that sign is the presence of this moment. What you don’t see of that sign—its hidden back, the contour of a bullet hole, minor erosions from the wind—that is the future. All you have to do is get there. Any moment.

There are layers of looking here: out, across, in. A vast beauty seems to rest on the edge of intimate dilapidation. That mountain explains nothing. This dead thing in the gravel fascinates mute. We don’t ask a mountain to explain itself. When the objects here rust, we don’t think it unfitting. When the woman on the bed turns to face the drawn motel curtain, we understand the landscape. It moves again.

What is it that brought you here? Who is it that left you here? How is it that you came to be familiar with these parts? Sun cuts down the fissure’s blond weft. Could it be told why the people here don’t leave? Kneel in this hard dirt so you can smell its traveling. Are these parts a whole of some kind? We came this way to get to somewhere else. The Coke machine is on the outside. I come here whenever I pass through.

There must have been a voice out here. Someone across the untouched contours. Likely it was a song. How does one fill a space like this? Certainly not with thought. One can think into these hills for more years than they can live and the wind will still carry it looser than sand. But now there are roads here and places to eat, to fill up. But that’s just us. The only thing that gets full here is the moon, or these ashtrays.