Coppertone and diesel fumes
combined create that sweet perfume
that rips olfactory nerves apart
triggers memories then they start

Exploding. On the coast of California
young Neil Taylor’s on the
radio reading Saint Paul clear
replies in kind, brings tears

To the eye of 1938.
Another year would be too late
for the French to even care
but fate was kind they sent a warship there.

Somewhere in the midst of Cheyenne County
or maybe Converse or
Campbell--you know I cannot tell
the three apart save for the hell

Of blackened pits and endless
coal trains rolling through the setting sun
the Thunder Basin prairie’s plowed
and traveled by unlucky cows

and busses in the twilight full of miners
looking out upon the
grassland as the light, it fades
to gas flares blotting out the Milky Way.

Out there is an intermittent island
only formed when flows are high
and even though it’s green
and storms have come, they’ve never seen

the river overtake the trackbed
or the levees ‘round the pits like open
wounds how they’d fill right up
and drown all of the sweet black sub-bitum-

inous wealth and choke the engines
chewing through the earth like heinous
visions from an elder time
awakened by the digging in the mine.

In twenty years the stripping ratio’ll
grow too large to matter, overburdened
the beds run too deep
the creosote will writhe and seep

into their souls. They’ll build some podunk
shack of a museum in the
middle of these nadalands
no one’ll come but it’ll stand

for thirty years or maybe more,
a welcome sign upon the door,
their blackened lungs pinned in a case
by statues bearing Peabody’s bronze face.

Back to where it started diesel fumes
and full of nausea. The
caldera is a crumbling crown
The narrow strait that’s knocking down

the seas. On the rocky bluffs, there might be
some small vestiges of green.
roaring forties, furious fifties,
tallest waves you’ve ever seen.

If a solitary tree can grow
in the middle of the
windswept plains in Wyoming
why oh why then not on this damn thing?

What did Saint Paul do to earn his title?
Wrote some letters to the Greeks
and Roman populace
martyred, he then lost his head.

And flew off through the centuries
gave his name to islands.
More than you are guessing
Maybe there’s a lesson

for the mine owners, the Peabody’s
the Arches, and the Cloud Peaks
If you seek to be beatified
the critical prerequisite is die.

Looking at the cinder cones
perched delicately on the southern flank
recalls the island’s birth
and all the embers rolling through the

earth and the flames recall
commodities that rise and then they
fall. A new one takes its turn.
we’re always looking for something to.

burn to push the pistons, drive the
crankshaft in their elegant ballet.
just like the tides that bind
one island to another in my mind.

Ohh
Ohh
Ohh
Ohh