CW: death.
This one is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.
How he would hate the state route’s ceaseless shimmer
like the flicker of a never-silver screen
or a ghost abroad by seventy-five years of noonday,
a cactus graveyard’s loose end.
Imagine searching forever for a cold one
in the sagebrush stretching under a boiled-off sky,
the high-rolling dream of atomic cocktails
as lost as heaven or a love-gift
between the neon hustles of Times Square and Glitter Gulch.
Not even a dead man can find the vanishing point
where the road runs back on itself to eternity.
Not even six bullets can straighten out fifteen years.
What a racket it is, this piper’s payment
of hearts left haunting the mirage of desert towns
where no one will ever fix the bridge
between what we desire and the truth—
blue-eyed as death, heard but never heeded
as each generation crashes through the rails.
