March Pebbles Glistening

 

autumn's fall

crimson leftovers
fall, angle down
crinkling sidewalks/footpaths and lawns/grass
in
thundered color

--

when we pull up to Rhyolite
that derelict Nevada ghost city

where it lays stranded in blazing
withering intense heat

deserted, forsaken, desolate
though 100 years ago, from this Cibola

half a million ton of gold
got extracted here in 1905,

became an instant city
in barren desert by 1907--

got water mains, sidewalks,
electric lights, telephones, newspapers, 

hospital, school, opera house, swimming pool,
imported Italian marble and stained glass,

stock exchange, 3 banks, 2 places of worship,
lots of brothels, 35 gambling dens, 50 saloons—

El Dorado? No; 

The gold city was only a brief flash in the pan--
boomed, busted, and abandoned in less than

10 years, a faded park brochure states;
miner Tom Kelly built a bottle house from

50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles;
and 70 years later, on the ridge behind

were created 12 chalky-white statues looking down,
“The Last Super” by Albert Szukalski,

a Belgian sculptor; through those paster-burlap
ghosts and crumbling structures, strong desert

wind blows, toward Death Valley, howling.

 

Introduction to a website of writer Daniel E. Wilcox, a reflective blogger, pebble-poet, fiction creator...

and kickabout mutant traveler of the mind, human history, the world, and, speculatively (stretching into deep time), the cosmos.

My wandering, wondering lines have appeared in many magazines including Contemporary American Voices, vox poetica, Dead Snakes, Word Riot, Centrifugal Eye, Camel Saloon, 

Tipton Poetry Journal, The Medula Review, Full of Crow, Front Porch Review, The New Verse News, Willows Wept Review, Eunoia Review, Quill and Parchment, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Clockwise Cat, Frame Lines, The Externalist, The Driftwood Review, Western Friend Magazine, Flutter Poetry Journal, Poetry Pacific, Frostwriting, Words-Myth, Ink Sweat & Tears, Erbacce, Static Movement, Counterexample Poetics, and Unlikely Stories IV.