Pilgrim

Waking up in the morning, the first noise I hear
is the triple dripping of the faucet, telling me
it has been going like that all night.

And I am waking up for the first time,
which doesn't matter much anyway. I suppose
dead pan humor works in the same startlingly

still way. The stillness is alive in the small toe
I swear must be broken, it is still so stiff
and pink and round. The books edging around

the lamp by my bed conquer some aspect of
myself I probably wasn't even aware existed
until I looked straight at the pages and disengaged.

Who is that trumpeter? Who plays the wooden fish?
The water gathers like archapelagaic land shapes
around the faucet bowl, and maybe the world

we have been living in for 60,000 years is really
in our Jazz Club bunkers, sanbagged like soldiers
with drumsticks for limbs.

This is where I feed

my cat in the afternoon, and this is where she shits.
This is the mantra of my inarticulation, and this
is the heavy sound of a rhythm, where it fits, like the

capicitance of my fingers on a television screen,
or the feeling of holding my knees by my chin
long enough until I feel absolutely nothing.

traveler who loves big skies, lonely roads, and infinite spaces will find all this and more on the Dry Cimarron Scenic Byway. Early travelers on the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail must have felt a sense of awe these limitless prairies. The byway spreads across northeastern New Mexico like a web, starting east of Raton on NM 72 and crossing into Colorado and Oklahoma. At 215 miles in New Mexico alone, this is one of the longer scenic byways in the state and takes several days to explore completely.

Three and a half miles east of Raton, NM 526 travels north from NM 72 through Sugarite Canyon State Park (Visitors' Center, 505-445-5607). Old buildings and foundations near the entrance to the park are the remains of Sugarite Coal Camp,countryation between 1910 and 1941. Camping, fishing, and boating are available at two small lakes Alice and Lake Maloya. The best time to make this drive is in the fall, when the leaves of the Gambel's oak are turning every color of the fall spectrum - green to yellow to orange to flame. The leaves shivering in the wind make the hillsides vibrate with warm color.

Driving east on NM 72 across Johnson Mesa, some of the most beautiful views in New Mexico unfold before you. To the north of the mesa loom the Colorado Rockies. The shadows cast by clouds drifting across the limitless sky darken the grasslands.

The Ess-Dog

Jess Bryant has been asleep nearly four hours
on a couch I borrowed from my parents, from a storage unit in Newnan

her body has the quiet curb appeal
of a low lined ranch modern house in a neighborhood

full of rich heart-red brick
she is making the noises a forest makes

when I am awake in a bedroom with windows
and still listening

to the quiet earthy shifts of grounded leaves
and piles of moss and dirt

in the reproductive night
Jess Bryant breathes like a racehorse sometimes

sometimes with her double long arms she motions
like a wild engine spilling its own fluid on itself

sometimes she can even talk to me while she is asleep
and still make sense, or maybe

I am still connecting dots
like a busy astronomer

on the floor of the ocean