Finding Your Inner Nevada
Past the unclocked walls of Bellagio Casino
(Every square inch a kaleidoscope of greed),
Beyond nuclear waste and test tunnel entrances,
Past quonset huts that store pickled alien invaders,
There are distant niches of desert solitude
Crouching in wait for you to find them
To force you back to you.
But first... you must wait,
wait until the quietude is seated.
Only then can small stones
Brush past the sage with pudgy questions,
Each expecting its own silver-stated simile.
Only then can the mountains guardedly approach,
Youthful, roughhewn,
But suddenly talkative -
Conscious of history inscribed by their slopes
And willing to teach you how to sit in the swivel wind
That blows in from all sides.
Life-spans move toward the horizon
So that someday the desert
Will come to recognize in you
A land with gaps and strictures
Like itself.
Geodetic-topographic surveys of metabolism
Show the flecked and pock-marked basins
Of your life -
The desert's own sequel,
Its next begotten child...
And the land will illuminate you
With sparks
From the sun of a lost eon
Sealed awake on its patient surface.
- Richard Hacken