"From such impressions you gather yourself, you win yourself back from the clamoring multiplicity, and slowly learn to know a very few things in which the eternal is reflected, which you love and in which your solitude allows you to take part." Rilke from "in Rome" Letters to a Young Poet. Some of his wise words help me get through the day.

Desert Threnody: essays, short fiction & one-act play

Published by the kind folks at auxarczen press in Missouri. 2020.

My two latest books from Stubborn Mule Press. The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away Selected Poems 1983-2018 (Finalist 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards) and Atlas of Wolves, 2019.

After the Funeral in Denver, Driving South into New Mexico

February on the winter betrothed plains. I share an anonymous rest stop with a lady trucker, she cooks something in the parking space on a small grill. I watch her breath as she empties the used grey coals into the snow. Short walk to the fence line and not far beyond it, near the Canadian River, they say a trail stop, some vernacular structure, a homestead, once raised a family, was a life-giving lone prairie light against the darkness and was abandoned un- ceremoniously, maybe to the last straw of a blizzard, or the coming of the railroad, maybe to the last man standing over Johnny Cash singing, "There Ain't No Grave", the night when there was no darkness worth its weight in damnation more remorseless than this prairie dark. the last of the whisky finished with a flourish in the gothic cold, rolled empty back into the black space that was once a well-lighted room. -John Macker >

Savage Defectives

A place in the desert,
once known for its heaven,
its perfected Aprils, became a city
of special hell:
not of Hieronymus Bosch, El Topo,
Peckinpah,
or chastened by Mephistopheles,
but where cities go that are too hot to die,
that perpetually reconnoiter eternity
for dollops of feral shade.

There was a national moment of silence
for the newly
fallen, language was
riding shotgun down the
hot, hate speech streets and
sighed:
you can lead
spoken word to metaphor
but you can't make it think.
Glocks cavort across the landscape now
with demystifying candor and extended clips
of the Sonoran chaos ferment in our
common dream.

Out here,
heavy, Moorish misting morning
hangs low over the foothills,
the white cowled peaks,
the winter temperatures adhere
to lows only whispered and beneath
us all,
a solstice underground juggernaut
of soul speaks: our guns

wait for us in heaven to die.

John Macker

Artaud in Mexico

Wearing his coyote death mask,
he tells the clueless Tarahumara
Rimbaud never met a French poet he
didn't disdain.
Eats peyote by the handful
from a painted gourd,
intuits the last words Sam Peckinpah
spoke to God,
reads A Season in Hell
by firelight
next to a graveyard
with its
fanciful colored metal crosses
and plastic
flowers;
chants: one must be absolutely
modern!
as the incantatory clouds climb like
smoking gun blossoms high over
Sierra Madre.

The Indians have mercy on this
tattered schizoid soul, install his
junkie ass upright on a drunken mule
for the long road home.
They recognize a kindred spirit
when they see one,
his garish, provocative nature not
at all at odds with
the fellaheen.

They dig his otherworldliness,
his seer's heart.

-John Macker
August/2011

Las Conchas

This is the summer of drought.
The playas dried up like cracked words on the lips,
the heat wore steel-toed boots,
the wind pillaged sacred Chicoma Mountain
in dry wrathful blasts. The
snake-tongued flames drifted north on
Santa Clara land. A
cool fire they say,
slow to crawl lone wolf
low to the ground, not hot
like Cerro Grande was:
insatiable, a terrorist. How do you say
in Tewa,
the hell hound is on our trail?
how do you pray away these
orchids of smoke?

The spirits
of the dead drift from grave to
Indian grave ahead of the fire,
some of them grieve for rain,
some are armed and dancing,
some stay safely underground,
cooled by the timber still
white moon.

-John Macker