Bucky Follows a Cold Trail

This mythos rides hard against the dust
gathered on broken headlights outside of Phoenix.

The go-to houses of the snowbird set: abandoned.
Just like the deli, the carpark, the celebrated taco truck.

Bucky’s horse kicks his delicate hooves, up and away
from the sundazed tarmac’s fading lines.

Plastic bottles are Bucky’s tumbleweed; empty
clotheslines his barbed wire. The west

has always dealt in economies of scale –
sheer canyons, widening bowls of dust;

crowds of miraculous gulls streaming
after plagues of hard, bright-bodied locusts,

but these foreclosure signs undo the terrain,
turn it back from paradise into a tough arroyo.

Trotting across a former golf course
grown back into desert, an infinite sand trap,

Bucky’s a girl-faced dude in the trash of a crash:
the lost wages of wealth’s vanity.