Last Outpost Layover

By Jim Provencher

  Stalled at a kind of boundary line
awaiting orders
Another afternoon
of pink grapefruit, soda & gin

People die, places endure
In a space of dead treelines and dry creekbeds
Chipping away at dense blocks of gravity
Noguchi-gouged granite, brutally knocking
into the heart of the matter

On that nowhere road
that takes you the way
a river takes you

Delighting in roughness,
what can be done with it
Making a figure of something else
yet something in itself

Making do, forgetting decorums
ranging outside nooks and books
sorting and sounding out

Pressing forward, pushing back
old haunts and homegrounds
recede in the rear-view

Snug in the limitless—
new threats loom
foraging carved remains of abandoned dwellings
bothered by algorithms and lack of rhythms
among those who appear happily occupied

Lying fallow, a still night in open country, listening—
the common nightcall of the bush,
idle chuckling, the single nightjar churring
a few words before setting sail

Lost but nothing lost on me—
Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl
We danced the fandango at Rosa’s Café

In Marion, Ohio
Warren Harding bought a paper
In Marion, Virginia
Sherwood Anderson ran two weeklies
One conservative, one liberal

The kind of thing they used to do—
Think of New York after the war
But which war?

I’m thinking what some may think
wrestling with time and the wind
burning down the wick
a fluttering, guttering flame

Resisting soft landings
Proceeding by indirection
Dead-reckoning the way home
Crossing the line
to wander greater voids

Endings, reading them differently
now that the writer’s gone
surveilling the smoking afterground
in the dank silence of dawn

In the Exclusion Zone
they sell lots of alcohol
At the crumbling outskirts remain
the few who could not survive
elsewhere, living on leftovers
among abandonment, gathering rocks
for what I don’t know

In the aftermath at the last outpost
daring to breathe where children learn to die
before they can tie their shoes

Retaining a forensic mindset in a redacted world—
Are you looking for something?
Are you waiting for someone you don’t know?

Operating in a fact-free universe
floating like smoke where the chimneys
burn night and day
Unwanted anywhere, by any country
Milked for cash daily by local cartels

In a long-ago life things happened fast
Nothing moving here now
What you see may be disturbing
No trigger warnings in a hair-trigger world

Wandering lost marbles, dropped by
giants who abandoned their play—
Was it all just a Banksy Job w/a money angle?

Clouds in the sky, thoughts in the mind—
Living in a house of ghosts
Coming and going
I must be on my way

Paused at the last checkpoint
Checking my bonafides
Flashing my frontier pass