The Tumbleweed
From the highway Its loose form spun And dervished, a dust devil. Thousands like it had gathered ‘Round the exits of the town And knitted a blockade. A Russian weed, It was. Its lifestyle communal. Shade-browed ranchers watched the tumbleweed, knowing It would lay Marxism’s seeds in the West, They feared it and eminent domain and prairie fires. The sunset declined and the weeds chittered In the waste. A longhorn died and they uprooted Its meat with muzzles like coyotes, or not at all Like that. Blinked eyes formed in silhouette. Dust devils — arbiters of a painted world. Each year their number grew, and soon they knew They’d won — that there would come a gray And whirling viny day Where all would sleep ‘Neath rust-red resurrection’s banner.
The Cartographer
Out of Calypso, Nevada Where the stubby trees planted by its founders stood enclosed in the mezzanine of the Palace Hotel, I plied my trade on horseback. About the trees — Supplicant, I filmed them. Scoped their landscape In my camera. Washed out by the sun. I plied my trade upon the hills above the town where few could find me. Looked down And as if grains in film Watched those passing by. Perhaps they looked At other things Or perhaps not. Each day I know The Bomb Will fall and then, Each distinction, each bit of beauty will be naught. The Big Bomb held low in the sky By a tear of mucus from a nose Above the clouds: from there the tumbleweeds flow, Motes of dust. So many had been put in the ground as heroes and By heroes before me. Below in the town The dead converge and loot the wagons The people are weep and The Bomb drops Low, Kisses the earth with Its muzzle. No explosion. It is still. The dead Still raging. Tumbleweeds still falling from the sky. I retched in disappointment for there was no tremendous boom to capture, And vomit yellowed on my shoe As the film fuzzed and no camera could capture My horse’s legs’ buckling. A slow leak, beauty still expunged. We would all be killed without any capture of it After all, and so to not rob us of catharsis I dropped my camera and plied my trade with dull pistol. Still shooting, I suppose. The dead still walked in the town below. Tumbleweeds, no exit. We must destroy what the bomb cannot.
— Noam Hessler is a poet from New England. They are currently a student at Vassar, and can be found on Twitter at @poetryaccnt1518.