Driving down from the Tsaile mountains juniper and piñon are sisters grow together.
She said hide your jewelry from the people they don’t have to know we had a ceremony
tuck the turquoise in your shirt even though it pinches your skin. Road is water siphon
from the tank wrap it with rubber inner tube flayed in strips. Water bubbles onto your
pants on the ride home bubbling from all the open blue water jugs in the truck bed
plastic bags tied as lids wind shrieking your ears. Down away turnoffs muddy cars and
trucks stranded muck swallowing wheels past the trading post dogs on the road old gas
pumps sealed up fluorescent light trees hollow. The hills purple here purple clay with
rocky mesa tops like castles in Quixote. This is not old sixty-six but it has the feel
sound of a single car rushing closing roar blinks past its wake tinny echoing your hair
catching wind. A hogan north of the highway on the plain shadow of the mountain.
Gone his wife and beauty queen daughter clan uncle Carson will live there alone. He
will die on this road in a car head-on his friend running drunk from the wreck. Carson a
mechanic always with his hands knobby at the knuckles building stories with his
dancing wrist talking fingers the carburetor shot you have to rebuild it. But now the
hogan stands empty they built it but the relatives said this is our land you can’t live
here. The road carves a fall and winter into the ground where you’ll live land of sloping
castles bluing mountains always. Always on the trembling road before and behind tuck
your necklace close to your skin.