TEXAS DIRT
by Lawrence Wilson
I can’t fly into Amarillo
Subject of country songs
For the way the name
Of the city sounds
Like ‘Amarillo By Morning’
In which the bull rider
Drives up from San Antone
And all the stuff he owns
Only half fills a suitcase
Which of course is battered
And leather without wheels
I can’t fly in looking at the ground
Without thinking how
The earth artist Robert Smithson
— His Spiral Jetty juts into
The Great Salt Lake —
Died out here in the Panhandle
In a small-plane crash
While he scouted from the air
For a place to put a piece
To be called Amarillo Ramp
He was going to push the dirt
Around and there’s a lot
Of dirt around here
Art to be paid for
By the local eccentric
Stanley Marsh 3
Whose house was Toad Hall
Whose fortune was in gas
A serial molester it turned out
He’d give new Mustangs
To high school boys
The car seemed cool until
You didn’t want to be seen in it
Stanley’s family fought with
Generations of Whittenburgs
They were Christian his was not
He locked some Whittenburg boys
Up in a chicken coop
For trespassing on his land
He used to make absurd
Street signs like ‘Road never ends’
And pay poor folks to put them up
In their hard-dirt front yards
He dyed acres of fields green
To make the largest pool table
And made a billiards felt
Of a downtown office roof
And he was going to pay Smithson
To build a ramp best seen
From the air but then
The plane went down
I don’t know if Stanley
Was standing below
On a walkie-talkie
Swearing at the Cessna’s descent
I don’t know how far it was
From the land art that is
The Cadillac Ranch
Stanley commissioned that
And with the singer
Put it on the map
He knew money can’t buy
Everything but it sure can buy
Art and
Damn this old boy is
Crashing and otherwise
Done moving the earth.
Being Texan, and rich,
Stanley built it anyway.
In a lake.
It’s dried up now.
The Amarillo Ramp is forever there.
Lawrence Wilson is a daily newspaper editor and twice-weekly columnist in California. He studied poetry at UC Berkeley with Josephine Miles, Thom Gunn and Seamus Heaney, and was one of the founding editors of the Berkeley Poetry Review. Every summer, he visits with cousins in the cabins of Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.
