October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw
By Rick Noguchi
Steel horses nodding
In the petroleum field are beasts
That suck
The crude of earth.
They have lived here for as long as I
Remember. This moment,
I smell wild incense:
Heather, abducted by a desert wind.
Its growth hides
The rain-carved ribs of the foothills.
Evening swallows
The city fasting on late fall.
Years ago, after hearing the story
About a boy who lost
Both legs while playing on an oil pump,
I was dared to straddle one.
All my friends were there to watch
The Pacific behind me burning with dusk.
The brute lifted me to the sky,
Where I merged with the twilight,
A warm breeze embracing my back.
None of them noticed
The world stopped to breathe.
When I looked, they disappeared.
Nearby in pink-flowered bushes
Someone found
The girl who’d been missing for weeks.
They stood in awe, the body
Decomposing, while I rode
The slow bucking animal.
Two months later, off the same pump,
A man dove,
An imperfect swan into night.
He landed in the dirt gully
Breaking the soft, white wings
He never had.
Today, I catch in my hand
An insect charged with lightning.
It tickles
The obscure scoop of my palm
As I hold it to my mouth and explain
A wish so simple
By morning I will have forgotten it.
I release
The bug to a desert wind
That is racing toward the sea,
A brutal dryness in its wake.
Fire in the hills everywhere.
Copyright Credit: Rick Noguchi, "October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw" from The Ocean Inside. Copyright © 1996 by Rick Noguchi. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: The Ocean Inside (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)