The gravity of the red sun in Navajoland,
impatient in the evening sky, held me down
to sixty-five miles per hour. The darkness came
as the mesas turned to introversion, purple shadows,
to trucks passing trucks passing little beat up Pontiacs
& brights resisting the temptation for head-on collision.
The blue-black raven gasped in the clouds
for a little sweet warm morsel of hope
of fresh road kill & the other fumes of promise.
Children played by the long-straight roadside
while mom & dad & uncle
& Bennie pushed a new Ford
toward the distance of the trading post's
ghostly red gas light glow.
Kayenta, Tyende, stood in a protracted war
against the holy emptiness of the crossroads
to Monument Valley, Dennehotso, Toe En Loc,
against the bog in the hole where the animals fell,
to the perennial stream emerging from a sandstone
quarry, reaching toward Laguna Canyon,
where flows concede themselves at Chinle Valley,
then the San Juan River, which is ecstasy.
Here, on the Redlands, the face gets long
& hollowed out as the stone children
at the roadside rest spot at Baby Rock.
Here, I came into the presence of the Kachina's son.
I could tell, I attest, I swear by the sudden drop
in temperature in the flat-bed truck,
the shadow passing through the back window,
an intuitive kick of fear
& the fall, like a cemetery stone chip,
of a cassette tape to the floor.
It happened where the plains became flat and the sunset,
lost in the hot winds, had long past dropped
into the curvature
of the canyon cut into Skeleton Mesa.
Later, after the Black Mesa coal elevator,
the duende jumped off
to claim its lonely home.
I thought I saw a wolf
in the rear view mirror.
From "Many Moons to Mythville: The Collected Road Poems," by Douglas McDaniel
