April 2017
David Chorlton
rdchorlton@netzero.net
rdchorlton@netzero.net
I have lived in Phoenix since 1978 when I moved from Vienna, Austria. Born in Austria, I grew up in Manchester, close to rain and the northern English industrial zone. In my early 20s I went to live in Vienna and from there enjoyed many trips around Europe, often as an artist working in watercolor. My poems have appeared in Slipstream, Skidrow Penthouse, and Poem, among others, and my Selected Poems appeared in 2014 from FutureCycle Press. http://www.davidchorlton.mysite.com
Author's Note: This isn't an actual wall poem, but one written during and about part of the border where it would go. We went to visit the pond in the desert back in January and hope to return when it is green in the springtime. This is in the Organ Pipe Cactus Monument, a region far too beautiful to be enhanced by a stack of bricks.
The Road Beside the Border
This is the road of laughing stones
beneath the wheels of cars that visit for a day
lying quietly and close
to clouds that soften ridges
cut from rhyolite.
It bends around the o
in ocotillo, and thins to a whisper
near Lukeville, where traffic
bears the names of Tresguerras, Lala, Castores
and Frio Express from Hermosillo
to Baja California.
It listens to the music
from a radio that carries
on cold air across
the iron fenceposts, while a raven
on a Mexican saguaro barks
above the noise
toward a raven in Arizona. How
insignificant the fence appears
that crawls up one slope and trickles
down another
from where a bobcat
stops to look. When the highway
on the other side is spurred
to hurry by an untranslatable growl,
the road to Quitobaquito
is the one
that walks.
©2017 David Chorlton
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