THE ROCKIES ARE NOT THE ONLY THINGS THAT END IN EL PASO

The border brings the night down around us
in a manner so oblique that sleep seems a bit
more like peripheral amnesia: brings on
almost dream music which is sound track for
these streets: Poplar, Alameda bring on the
industry of creative energy at the site of
Pancho Villa’s long-ago bulldozed apartment
on Porfirio Diaz. It appears to be a duplicity
of holding hands, crossing over diabolical
bridges that make writers Lisa McNeil and
Lawrence Welsh realize the importance of
that photo of chief Crazy Horse handcuffed
in a Government compound being total
reinforcement of all American liberty, as if
they were required to traverse the verse of
rebel poets pitching themselves headlong
along the Rio Bravo, into the chaos of border
town changes, where the women of Juarez
are being kidnapped, murdered and
discarded, everyday, in the heartbreak of
Indian West, where police and politicians
turn their backs on the tip end of the
Franklyn Range, where the Rockies finish
pointing in the direction of Cincos Puntos.
We are moonstruck, and high, as just one
more circle of 5ths from Bird’s 2nd set at
St. Nicks Arena: or intermission riffs from
Stan Kenton’s Innovations orchestra: 1948
wasted with dissonance. A percussive
drizzly rain turns into the Duende of wind
and music: Cal Tjader-like vibrations from
Fronteras No Mas: the oxygen of calm
weather is Samadih vanishing in a trance
of Isuara: East Indian / Afro-Cubano
influence in a segregation of absolutes
near Smuggler’s Gap. Pagan gods are
terrific transformers without burnt
offerings of the devout and early morning
deisels: the GA-UNH of truck horns
hollering and Transmountain gravel
sounding like the crunch of Almond Rocha
in the night. Vedanta Trinity vision, now,
Vishna, Brahman, Shiva and breezes
become Coltrane saxophone investigation cries
saying: we are not Too Young To Go Steady
with centuries of the Upanishads in Tibet:
Zionists in the hills of Jerusalem: white
Protestants in Barnstaple: Catholics in
Cuernavaca and Anasazi Indians living on
multi-level mesa mysteries. Now, El Paso
is at journey’s end as though we were
just outside a crummy museum, about
sixteen miles north of the Mexican border,
looking at an assortment of vintage tabloid
tear-sheets: one advertising 1928
automation: Studebaker Dictator Six long
before the word “dictator” had a negative
connotation. The performance ends at Valle
Verde and, as we know, the rose at noon loses
the beauty it had at dawn. A young girl: her
feet encased in cork wedgies, while she ends
her 1950’s beauty parade retro-walk across
the hard quadrangle: and all our ideals that
began about a thousand histories ago will
continue living on adobe walls down going
into these simple cantinas of Segundo Barrio.
And this is, also, rumored to be the place our
contemporary fantasies really do end, on the
other side of the Texas border, in Santa Teresa,
New Mexico, under a hazy sun, as it makes its
miraculous journey across the road of the sky,
as though it were a convertible orange car
which will, all too soon, carry
what’s left of us…………..away.
Paseo Del Norte ( 2009)