Thin Men II

I dream a lot – I dream about. Tall thin men with faces which plunge from the tops of tall thin heads to the bottom of tall thin legs.  Faces that look like Mt Rushmore with cheeks you can shelter your horse under during a wild desert storm.  While you hunker down under your hat.  Raindrops dripping down slick oil skin and tanned Mexican leather.  Tall thin men who unfold themselves and speak to me. Their voices bigger than the Grand Canyon where diamonds stud a black velvet night and crickets grope their paws together to stamp out the prairie chill. Send lost signals to each other in the dark.  Tall thin men who unfold in faded Levis, walk bandy legged into a young morning.  A pink stain spreads upwards from the end of the earth.  Something is bleeding.  Their tall thin bones so thin, so white, I could snap them over one knee.  They roll up their bedding, their backs to me, facing some horizon I cannot see. Tall thin men who gulp in air and whole valleys disappear.  Valleys with purple and yellow wildflowers that I would have picked, disappear along with the white wooden church with the cross that glints one in the sunlight before being swallowed forever by the breath of a tall thin man.  Cheekbones like jagged prairies where the tumbleweed scuttles in the wind like furtive spiders, settles in dusty corners, peeks out from the shadows all twisted.  I dream of tall thin men and Navaho camp fires, cowboy coffee hugged by thin fingers which were granite cold but now flow hot and liquid around the lips of blue enamel mugs dotted with tiny clouds; indentations to roughen the touch of the smooth flow of things.  Tall thin lips which speak from the shadows of the ledge of the tall thin hat which hides the prairies and the plains, the valleys that have disappeared along with the flowers I could have picked, the cheekbones like Mt Rushmore, the white wooden church, the steeple with the cross sending a last signal before being swallowed.  I dream of a tall thin man on a long dark night above a flame in a valley somewhere in a canyon where wild horses take shelter, where crickets grope blind in the dark and diamonds fall from the sky after midnight.  Tumbleweed skitters like spiders legs and entwines my tall thin dreams with the shadows of men who have come and gone and gone again and again to the horizon they always face.  Their backs to me.  They are deaf and dumb and blind to me.  All of this sucked up in a whisper of a tall thin breath which spreads over me like a blanket and is held forever.