Promised Land
Promised
Land hitches Highway 64 every day
between Farmington & Shiprock.
Just out of his
prison shoes after his fourth DWI, some
nights
he sleeps at Bob’s Car Wash in one of the
stalls
where it’s almost a room with a swamp
cooler.
The
other “weavers,” that’s what he calls drunks,
steal the groceries that he’s taking home
for
his daughter. The weavers steal his carton
of
eggs & bread & cheese. He sees his
ex from time
to time, selling herself for a can of
hairspray
&
a bottle––she’s never seen their daughter
since day one. His mother’s a drunken wore.
His
father, a drunk, got run over in Teec Nos
Pos
when he was sixteen. Promised Land knows
what it comes down to. The dream’s not
finished.
That’s
his place back there with the pink trailers,
rabbits, upside-down piano, City Market &
Little
Caesars––just beyond the bridge over the
San Juan River, the muddy San Juan. Promised
Land’ll tell you all about that rust silver
bridge.
How
he dropped from the girders onto trucks
Rolling
by. How he leapt into the river those
Long
summers past.
Shiprock, Navajoland
20
July 1996
[Published in The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The
Ridge:
Poems 1993-1997. © 1998 by Jim Cohn.]
APPEARS IN
The Dance Of Yellow Lightning Over The Ridge: Poems 1993-1997
(Writers & Books Publications, 1998)