2.

We were saved by a man who'd given up on God
and didn't much believe in any Promised Land

who found the God in you enough to sustain him for
the rest of his life and he brought his new family

to this fortress of solitude, a small ranch-house
with a generator, sweltering in the shade of cottonwood

It was as far from any paved road as from
your dream of an all-electric home

You could see any intruder on the leading edge of a dustcloud
slicing down that desert road a good mile away

No one would find us here
There would be no surprises

The ranch-house was surrounded by a moat of green pasture
under constant siege from an ever-expanding wasteland

of sagebrush and salt flats, the end of the world
within walking distance of our back stoop

Decades of porous antlers and faded license plates
adorned the side of the barn, its history

lost on me as we blew in
dragging our ghosts

Settling into this last retreat
we were thankful to put the past behind us

The distant blue mountains of the Snake Range hovered in a dry haze
where the Pleistocene lapping of Lake Bonneville waves

are forever embossed in fossiliferous limestone not far
from the Utah border just off the loneliest road in America

Even as we learned to spell our new last name
counting humps in the double “m” which rolled

                                3