Twenty turtles sunning near a Tolsun pond,
some grave mistake by the concrete God,
poking their noses under the dry air
of the sickly-too-blue-water desert oasis
with a moat and a bridge,
reasons enough to daydream
in the electric wasteland,
the green-belted island,
as subliminal salamander men
dig deep beneath the Earth
& offer hovercraft to humans
who poke at them with blunt spears,
then came the Huhugam river people,
building canals within canals,
holding water in red-clay pots,
embattled by summer monsoons,
growing corn & squash & mesquite beans & cotton
along the Laveen & Pecan Promenade,
the Gila gorgeous, shallow & broad,
with a tendency to rage when it rains,
a land now gone alienated, isolating minds
& the wind fails to turn pages for Tiowa,
Any witnesses worn by erosion, gone,
& the mandatory meetings
where we first meet Jesus
and all go out for a drink;
Oh yes, you're always rich
if the rest keep on winning,
sponsored & supported
by streaming stone scorpions,
Kachina-shouldered towers
lifting Palo Verde nuclear lightning
as the hawks fly in wonderment,
while all Tolsun roads south,
cut off by not-so-funky-Broadway,
a long stretch of farms & rancheros
& irrigated green fields stinking of manure,
as confused crows carry the drafts east,
hovering over a toxic dump long as a hippie jam
looking for the long lost gone-quite-secret lands
disappeared into box castles
big and white as clouds, no people outside,
an amber-green prickly pear trampled by time,
all overlooked from Monument Mountain,
where the first meridian line was drawn
by pioneer surveyors at the confluence
of the Gila & Agua Fria Rivers,
farm implements clinging to the sand,
crunched into tiny plastic buttons,
crushed and fed right to people
with a gusto for high-fructose corn syrup,
slouching toward the suburbs, ever marching,
but the twenty turtles won't let you near them,
they instinctively feel your quantum GPS
approaching, perhaps a change in the light,
and then return to the faux-stone outcropping,
nearer to the road in the warmth of sun,
returning to their mummy depths, moonish white,
expecting to survive the next one-hundred-year flood
- Douglas McDaniel
Tolleson, Arizona
