Two Poems

Kevin O’Rourke 

 

MARFA

1.

Its origin is in whim: named in 1881
by Hanna Maria Strobridge, wife
of the chief engineer of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, after the character Marfa
Strogoff, from the Jules Verne novel Michael
Strogoff—Marfa being the protagonist’s
mother—when Hanna and her husband passed
through the region, Marfa, Texas is
a dusty trapezoid of a town, set
in the high desert, roughly an hour away
from Presidio and Ojinaga, on the Mexican
side of the border, which crossing, despite its
arid remoteness, has been identified as a
High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
by the powers that be in Washington,
DC, 1800 miles east and 4500 feet
lower, down toward the sea.

2.

We hiked and found watermelons;
we saw a roadrunner; we dipped our feet
into a brick-walled oasis, fed by springs,
& a minor wetland by the parking lot; we
ingested jalapeno seeds and lard at a gaudy
restaurant painted in primary colors &
Speedy Gonzalez by the door, his tiny arms
open & welcoming; we lolled in hammocks; we
drank “signature cocktails”; we watched
the purple football players gallop
forth & back, with great violence. Ambulance
peals broke the night.

3.

And off to the right, somewhere out there, in the black,
stood the flickering lights of Mexico,
from which
the radio waves drifted north
across the border, unencumbered by partition.
Then the checkpoint rose out of the desert
like a mirage,
coming over a rise and blinding, these,
we were later told, were the mountains where Willie Nelson
was arrested, with six ounces of
marijuana. Everyone laughed
but my Sikh friend,
whom the dogs menaced.

4.

“I was driving across the landscape, and there was this endlessness in Texas,”
said the painter Rackstraw Downes. “There’s almost nothing, it is desert, and there’s just a little bit of scrubby vegetation here and there, and then suddenly in this emptiness were these pink mountains around the edge of it. Every direction there were these hills.”

“I first came out to Marfa because of the mountains.”

5.

Art galleries, pizza joints, and liquor
stores; Prada, smoothie blenders,
and campgrounds run by sculptors; gas
stations, bodegas, and roosters stalking front yards;
and English and Spanish and half-broken Spanish
names mispronounced over the loudspeaker
after a first down, police lights
spinning behind you on the highway, two
miles over the limit, just makin’ sure
you aren’t the wrong
color, and the field
hands wiping their beans with
tortillas, preparing themselves for
another day without shade, upon
the hot, cracked, dusty earth,
nearly one mile up.

BROAD STREET

“Some miseries are inevitable”
is the only line that’s stuck
around since that Sunday in
July, night, hot on the street,
hot in the house, hot in
the bar where we sat as
you told me your marriage was
failing. To cope, some perform
rituals with stones; some simply
go to work. I prefer
the fog of nostalgia,
its reluctant embrace.
Our public program is second
to none, but we admit
our murals need retouching.

                  ◊