Annie in Montana

The sun dips. Brooding pink
the mountain ridge
leaks blood on inky darkness.

Red in miniature
brake lights settle flesh
on the mantle of a parking lot,

snow fresh, spindrift floating
warm beneath the fender where,
intimately sheltered,

flakes and tender chips
cave-in. Carmine elements
of storm and carnal house collide

in searing heat drilled deep.
Hands sped from dash
to glove box, hot

all local antagonists
cocked and loaded everybody
flares at once to life

beneath a cold star,
driving stick as night lifts
thru gears and shifts and starts.

© Dominic James

El Dorado

In search of what, exactly?
An alchemy at second hand,
some history which boys demand
of Keats’s watcher of the skies
or Herzog’s Deutsche conquistadors,
acting like Klaus Kinski’s pie-rats
assembled on a leaky craft:

Rust shed from every cuirass ding’d,
with Spanish halberds bent for oars
facing wild swamps and cataracts,
endless flights of arrows, darts:
each branch come looping from the dark
to snag a sleeve, we mark curare-dipped/
a python.

        Slowly turning on the stream,
monkeys pick their sleeping forms,
there is no coin to catch the eye
nor a sniff, a rind of bacon:
their notions of a dish of gold trumped
in a second flat with the recollection
of hamburger steak, double-downed
a goofy flash on Snapchat.

© Dominic James