Poem for Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Cathexis

I.

Freud said Besetzung--an occupation, a
taking possession of. I am no psychologist, but
I am inclined to agree.

II.

All winter you have made it your mission
to keep the ground purely white. You sigh when
you see frozen heaps of ashes. You cringe
at the sight of crow's blood smeared against
the snow in tiny flecks.

III.

You never tell me about any of your childhood
memories.

IV.

When the snow melts here, it takes part
of the ground with it. When the next snow comes,
the cycle repeats. It is beautiful. It is meta-
chemical.

V.

You make it your mission to wake up with
the sun to see if it will pierce through the fog.
You drink your coffee while the sky is
aflame. All winter you do this.

Poem for Monday, December 2, 2013

We Laid in Those Same Fields

There was something about the position of
the sun, like someone tossed it skyward and

it got stuck in the oak branches, dripped fire on
our clothes below, like someone had that kind

of power. Did you have that kind of power?
Your daddy bush-hogging in the distance, we

laid in those same fields, learned to make small
talk, to feign interest in the shapes of clouds and

how to flick invisible mosquitoes off of each
others' hands. I had so many questions then, so

I asked one: why do you pluck the honeysuckle
petals and arrange them on your dress but never

taste them? Later on, we laughed as the tractor
stalled and your daddy cursed in the heat. That is

when I wanted you most--when everything was
torrid, when calm and chaos existed together in

those few quiet seconds. There was something
about how we laid there, the history of the grass

underneath your slender back. How people whose
names we would never know probably bled on it,

cut it down and watched it grow back again like
nothing ever happened.

Poem for Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Breach

You reach for something in the dark:

your hand, a delicate foreign object, slides through
the membrane of my dream.

It lands in a wheat field. I stand in front of this old
farm house. Red and white paint chips from the trim
rain down like confetti.

Your grandfather, whom I have never met, is there.
Real men, he says, break their backs. Real men
have thicker blood.

He begins to ascend. I look up at the sky. It is the
exact same color as the veins in the old man's neck.
I make the connection.

I start for the field then. I find your hand between the
golden stalks and begin to pull hard. The sun whispers
that it just killed Icarus.

It takes months to see your whole arm. It takes years
to see your eyes. But I stand, I pull, aging in the heat:

my back broken, my blood thickened
until I wake and after.

Poem for Sunday, November 10, 2013

Meantime

Someone is trying to describe the sky, thinking
of synonyms for gray. Someone is dancing in
the devil's evening shadow. Someone is peeling
potatoes and sniffing the skins before throwing
them away. Someone is burning an effigy, and
someone else is feeling the heat under their arms.
Someone is saying I love you in an empty room
and meaning it.

Someone is picking wildflowers and giving them
Latin names. Someone is obsessing over dark
matter. Someone is eating toffee and suddenly
missing their childhood. Someone is relinquishing
everything. Someone is dropping a vase, seeing
their face multiplied in tiny crystal fragments.
Someone is saying I know in an empty room
and meaning it.

Poem for Saturday, November 2, 2013

Virgen

We have few things here--no long Indian
summers, no window-toothed skyscrapers,

no lights, almost. There is one string
of lights between the moon and the ground

coiled around the Virgen de Guadalupe,
her holiness boxed in glass to protect her

hands, to keep them soft, white, clasped
in prayer through this black November

night. She catches you strolling by her
street, beckons you, and suddenly you

are standing  in front of her with your hands
in your pockets. You think of all the drifters

here in town and recall those childhood
stories of saints clad in tattered clothes

and panhandling angels. Through the glass,
she tells you to not be fooled--none are

like that, all of them are very much men,
most of them godless. You remember then

how her heart was broken the hardest,
turn around, continue into the dark.

Poem for Saturday, October 26, 2013

Message

She left with the blood-red leaves
of autumn, whirled out the door

in the same wind that took them.
Outside, the sun tears through

the naked maples with branches
outstretched like crucifixion, like

something beautifully broken and
tinged in the gray of surrender.

Inside, everything still functions.
You notice things like how loud

the wall clock ticks, how the
table has become amassed with

plates and cups. She left one last
ring of coffee there, inches away

from her napkin, as if to say
this is how it must be.

Poem for Thursday, October 17, 2013

Lessons from Stanford

I.

There are countless metaphors for death, each
more cryptic than the last;

death is indifferent towards them all


II.

There are several ways to judge a man:

the length of his string of crappie
the way he rolls his tobacco or if
he can clutch your soul and mark it
with his stories

There is one way to judge a woman:

is there fire in her eyes?


III.

There is something incredibly significant in
this image:

         a moonlit knife shining under the
         creek bed, washed clean
         of blood (on the
                              surface)
                 

IV.

We are those bloody knives, all of us
gazing up wide-eyed beneath the ripples
irradiated in moonbeams
tear-glazed and beautiful

Poem for Monday, October 14, 2013

Tumbleweed

Cutting through this mountain town--
that windblown ball of twigs
in a perpetual hurry,
rolling

        past the murder of dumpster crows
behind the Chinese restaurant,

        past the drunk native woman singing
in the little league diamond,

        past the jackhammers and chunks
of uprooted asphalt,

        past the tawny beer bottles clanking
in forgotten brick alleys,

        past the unlit Virgen de Guadalupe
candles on cluttered desks,

        past the leaves and the pine needles
dying mid-air deaths,

       past the the drunk native man flipping
the bird at a bus stop,

       past the dew-kissed grass recovering
from the morning frost,

       past the two bundled lovers sharing
cigarettes in the sun.

Godspeed, then, desert seeker--
we understand how winter
stalls for absolutely
nothing.

Poem for Saturday, September 28, 2013

Sonata

We heard the piano first--notes struck by blood
under fingers, nothing more, carried away
in the mountain wind. They were so hopeful, and
they were so sad, floating in

the atmosphere with angels,
nitrogen and other things. The violin next, stealthy,
puncturing the air with the graze of the first string.
It took over then, defined

the whole sound: a metaphor,
you decided, for us.

           Remember when that music was still playing?

           Remember when the fog finally shrouded
           the moon?

Poem for Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Mongolian Waltz

An aging school gymnasium, any handful of dilapidated
concrete buildings--these are the places they do it.

They waltz to the same polka song, frozen on replay,
birthed painstakingly by dust-smothered speakers.

The same accordion expands and contracts, screams
its shrill Bavarian scream in the middle of a desert

in central Asia. In January, when winter refuses to
forgive, I lean against the lukewarm radiator and

watch them count, shuffle, spin. Each pair locks
eyes, shows an inkling of a smile and orbits their own

invisible sun. But their minds--their minds waltz
even more. They waltz through the times their children

grow up and leave home, the times the cold takes
most of their sheep. They waltz through the seasons

to when suddenly it is warm enough to deliver
their foals and to bury their mothers and fathers.

I wait against the radiator, my breath floating above,
knowing one of them will eventually take my hand

and pull me in the dance. I will waltz with her then,
meet her eyes and return her smile. I will spin through

the times winter broke my bones straight to when
I had my picture taken under the crab apple tree

in my grandparents' yard, year after year, blaring red
against the autumn sky.

Poem for Friday, August 30, 2013

Monsoon Season

Metal has a terrible voice.

It stumbles sot-like through a forest
of octaves. I lack the heart to tell it
so I let it sing me to sleep.

I am no trainspotter; I prefer clouds.
They stir me awake with their melodic
dirges--the price of omnipresence.

She asks how come the clouds in
monsoon season look so ominous but
bring so little rain. I tell her:

everything, all of us is a facade.

Poem for Thursday, August 15, 2013

Three Autumns Ago

This one evening in October when the power
failed, when it bled out from black cables


forming parabolas over sod fences, snakelike,
dissipating into the valley, I went inside his


house. Darkness abounded, of course, so
I followed a draft into the kitchen, gripping


the hem of its imaginary dress like a child, like
some curious little child. He pulled out a stool


at the table and lit a candle so I could write a
letter. Looking out the window, he stood with


his arms behind his back, one hand gently
cupping the other, watching the spectacle for


a few minutes. I stopped writing to watch him,
to feel his eyes wax and drip through the


glass like the very candle in front of me, and
without turning his head he told me to come


over and look out with him in a tone tinged
with a beautiful urgency. Then, he said this:


Tenger khaaya ulaan baidag. And at that
moment, there it was: a bloody war in the sky


started by the sun. Before it passed, before
I returned to my pen and staggering flame, I


had to acknowledge his words and whisper
back in agreement: yes, the sky is seldom red.

Poem for Sunday, August 4, 2013

A Hundred Years

Piano Rags by Scott Joplin
has been spinning all
day.


The whooshes and clanks
of thirty-boxcar trains
promptly follow;


black-ink night has seeped
into the sky. Tonight my
dreams


will drag me back a hundred
years by eyelids clenched
shut;


there will still be a war. If I
fight, my letters to you
will be


bloodstained and eloquent.
A thousand miles
away,


you will dance gracefully
as tattered flags kiss
the dirt.

Poem for Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Fruit Vendor

This stretch of highway has poor drainage,
I thought about calling to her. If it floods,
your fruit could drift away in the
muck.

Her feet were propped against a trailer
full of twenty-something ripe melons.
This called to mind Lorca, loitering by the
watermelons in a certain Californian
supermarket.

Around her, the atmosphere dampened
and grayed, advanced towards ashes. You
should have seen how oblivious she was
when lightning broke the stitches in the
northern sky;

when the thunder ripped through sound
just as those bullets had done on
that summer day near sleepy
Alfacar.

Poem for Thursday, July 11, 2013

What We Leave Behind

The lost cry of the seabird, Neruda said.
This is true, along with the damp
sand, its stick-scrawled proclamations
of love and the lovers

who wrote them, barefoot
and young. Next the ships, masted
under sails of white surrender, built
from oak trees, from spruce trees

that once skinned our arms,
that once sliced the moon
with its branches and peppered us with
the light. Then everything else

too burdensome to list that accretes
into something cosmic, something
composed of stardust, cups of coffee,
library books, conversations and

bougainvillea vines. Finally, the seabird

itself, crying out an elegy against
roars of salt-tinged wind, hungry
for reaction.

Poem for Saturday, July 6, 2013

Damascus Steel

Passing by a certain field bleeding yellow
wildflowers--

what came to mind was when a girl told me
to wait for her in the tabernacle because
she wanted to change into something I would
like. After she left, I sank in the oak for some
minutes, swatted at the dragonflies, wondered.

Finally, I caught her: xanthic hair, flanked by
her girlfriends, approaching in a summer dress
lost somewhere between lavender and indigo.
These were the circumstances of her return.

And then, "What do you think?"

She slayed me with the force of Damascus steel.
She had the skinniest legs.

Poem for Friday, June 28, 2013

Two Lovers

In the hill country, the winding curves tend to lull me
to sleep. My dreams go like this:

Somewhere out there, two lovers are making love
in a pile of alfalfa hay while the sun cooks their
young limbs. When they finish, she curls into sleep
imagining how their children will look. He slips off
into the woods, treks a dry creek bed and cuts
his leg on a jagged rock. His blood forms a new
river.

Minutes later: the stink of dead coon. I awake then,
lost in an army of black-eyed Susans.

Poem for Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Nineteen Ninety-Seven

There was the time we sat on some brick steps
with an empty glass bottle between us. We
used it as a makeshift ashtray while cars with
broken mufflers shot north, while honeybees
selectively pollinated the hydrangeas, while
sweat greased the backs of our knees. You
asked me where I came from, so I said look
around, this is it, this is where I come from;
the highway in front of us, the pine sap
dotting the old Chevy. The red shutters, the
empty window boxes, the cloud formations
above proclaiming blood wars and summer
storms. I confessed to you the time I trapped
a bumblebee inside a mason jar turned
upside down against the grass and watched
it orbit frantically until it suffocated and the time
I ripped an earthworm in half before drowning
it in a five-gallon bucket of faucet water. I
have not played god since nineteen ninety-seven
but where do you come from, I asked. You
pointed towards a random spot, a random set
of coordinates in the atmosphere, indicating
you did not expect me to understand. It began
to drizzle then

Poem for Tuesday, June 11, 2013

The Indian Woman under the Tent, Name Unknown

Beneath a blue tarp
      not like the sky
she is saved from the sun
      not like the pines
canyon-swallowed in
      dark green surrender

in her chair, sitting
      red clay, gravitas
some southern tourists
      eye her wrinkles
finger the turquoise
       laid on her table

her daughter recites
      who carved the flutes
who made the jewelry
      breaks their fifties
and sends a message
      on her cell phone

if you were to ask
      she would explain
the eagle feather
      will guard your soul
and remain so delicate:
       like this

she would say words
      in her language
for you to repeat
      and smile childlike
at the blood on your
      fresh bitten tongue
     

Poem for Saturday, June 1, 2013

The American Southwest in Four Parts

I.

Entering and Leaving the Muskogee (Creek) Nation:

along the interstate is a row of dead
trees standing as ghosts among those green
and living. their branches imply they
died while dancing--wind-stripped and
painless. down further in an open field are
clusters of black cattle munching their
way through spring. there is nothing
else.

II.

Driving through a One-Horse Texas Town:

in Vega, TX exists one of the handful of
Shamrock gas stations left. across from it is
another gas station and across from it is
some kind of white silo or tower that
surrenders to the sun a little more each day.
across from it is a wooden building lettered with
'Saloon'. combine everything and what you have
is a lonely intersection.

III.

Cutting through the Land of Enchantment:

crossing the northeastern border is more
surreal with the radio on. the signal is aflame
and will crack-hiss until you find the first of
the four or five stations: mariachi band music.
spoiler alert: the others are honkytonk and classic
country. once upon a time, there were buckets
of blood spilled in this desert.

IV.

Cresting the Red Rock Formations in Sedona:

they are not mountains. mountains are formed
from upward thrusts of the earth. they are products
of sedimentation--erosion, wind, sand, clay, skin
and blood. there are two differences between us
and them; bones and the ability to endure time and
humanity. we shall never have the latter and they
have no need for the former. these are the things
to which we must succumb.

Poem for Friday, May 17, 2013

Vintage Love

We could be like a Motown song
that was recorded but never
released. Two parts soul in a
dusty basement studio:

You are in the corner lipping a
cigarette, the filter inevitably
rouged.

I watch the ashes scatter and tarnish
the floor to the crescendo of
trumpets.

*

After the sugarpies and honeybuns,
what we become is background
noise.

Poem for Monday, May 13, 2013

Spring of Consciousness

I walk west down the street

to examine the rebirth

of everything.

To the persimmons:

I loved you before your first

leaves shriveled

into existence.

To the pollen:

you top my endless list

of necessary evils.

I wonder why some women

are smitten by cliches:

your eyes are as blue

as the sky's.

I am a walking blue-eyed cliche

wistful with a

fistful of dandelions

yellow as the sun.

I am not due a heartbreak

for six more months.

Poem for Saturday, May 4, 2013

Ricochet

In the woods several miles
away from here,
the coyote--the Aztec
trickster--trades blood
with the moon. His howl
is savage, is beautiful
and the stars are
too civilized to not turn
their heads.

Closer, locomotion pierces
through blue collar
America. In the smoke
and singing metal, I am
eight again. I am a skin-
kneed train chaser, air rifle
cocked. I am wind-tossed
among red clover. Shoot.
Ricochet. Return to
twilit present.

Look how many nights
were stolen.

How far we have come
and gone.

Poem for Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Lagerstroemia

You, under dirt and lime, still speak to me
through sudden startles of wind and the bottoms
of my feet. Like this:

Angels are dressed as bread bums, you say.

Don't forget to bless your food, and one time,

How are my prized crape myrtles?
Are they clumping pink or white?

See, I learned about you through porch stories
those humid afternoons when I breathed in
intervals between cloud bursts and swatted away
the bumblebees.

Again, you speak. The wind screams against
everything then stops to reform. I nod down at you
in complete concurrence:

I will not take love lightly when it comes.

You were born in the summer
just like your flowers.

Poem for Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Talking about Existence on the Roof with Nadeem

I.

What he wanted to say was the
ineffable. The dogwood buds drooping
against humid night. The lights refracting
through the hospital windows across
the street. The magic
of hyper-awareness



II.

We smoked through the millenniums as the
occasional car trudged on to nowhere. Religion
then big bangs then the human brain and
all its synapses. The most poetic thing that could have
occurred then: a breeze-plucked leaf spiraling
towards the indifferent ground



III.

He was wearing a red polo and glancing at his
dangling feet. Then he gazed up at the
sloping wooden fence and remarked--as if on behalf of the
entire universe--everything has
meaning



IV.

Propellers in the sky interrupted. They sliced through
sleeping stratus clouds just because they could. They whirred
with the power of celestial acoustics. God
they could have delivered Derrida's gift
without warning or bow
 
                                       *

Something cannot come from nothing, he proclaimed
before the helicopter overtook us.
We descended

Poem for Friday, April 5, 2013

These Days Have Passed

My grandfather, who gave me my round countenance and sharp
ears, was a butcher by trade. He could cut and slice shanks just
like he could breathe.


One afternoon long ago, when most roads were gravel and Russia
was our main concern, he was fired from his job at a local super-
market. The manager


happened in the walk-in freezer, and there stood Angus, cleaver
in one hand and shiny silver flask in the other. Bloody-aproned.
Expression unknown.


I cannot say who was the manlier: the butcher juggling whiskey
and meat, or the man who had the courage to terminate him
without wetting himself.


I cannot remember from whom I heard this--my mother or my
grandmother--but I listened to them tell it, probably on a blue-
skied day, over a glass


of iced tea or a cigarette, against the background noises of my
lost generation, like it was the most important thing my ears and
heart would ever accept.

Poem for Friday, March 29, 2013

Equinox

Through still dead arms of oak and birch
a single-engine plane sputters
across its own equator

angering the very sun.

It is no secret that we are still between
seasons. That an ice-wind
oligarchy can rule with

stone-faced vengeance.

It is no secret that we are still between
seasons. Still dead crops
out the plane window

choked by wildflowers.

Here we have the age-old cycle: waking
from a silly kind of death

to thaw
  to bloom
    to whisper sweet nothings
       to your love across the room.

Poem for Monday, February 25, 2013

In February

The morning appears through naked branches
and leaves

The evening
I trudge through, sloshing in cold-wet buckskin

There is no bitter taste in between;
There are the ghosts of pines,
Their whispers sapped with swill:

                   We heard the stars knock boots, they say
                   We buried Icarus in the Ozarks, they say
                   We kept our secrets

Like good little trees should.

Poem for Tuesday, February 8, 2013

Dunkirk 

I.

We must first establish this:

the salt in the ocean those days in 1940
is the same salt
in the ocean these days
is the same salt
in our vulnerable bodies, yours and mine.

(This is transitivity.)

___________________________

II.

I dreamed I swam days to save you
as the Atlantic diffused through me.

I dreamed the salt sliced my eyes
when the blue-tinged sun ignited.

I dreamed everything ignited
and your skin peeled and bled.

I dreamed my arms almost broke
then I collided with a skiff's hull.

I dreamed the skiff belonged to
a bearded man from Hastings.

I dreamed he and his young son
were pulling in soldiers with cod.

I dreamed you were on the skiff
emaciated and beautiful.

I dreamed you could not believe
how I came to your rescue.

I dreamed of course, how could I not
and was glad for German indifference.

(This is subconsciousness.)

___________________________

III.

I wake up, cotton-mouthed.

I drink fresh water.

You sleep still.

I check your pulse.

Your skin, pale prunes.

I trudge towards the kitchen.

God, thirsty.

(This is consciousness.)

___________________________

IV.

Suddenly, I love the way our kitchen
is decorated. Cornflower blue tile
tessellating around an oak island.

Does it smell brinier now? For
breakfast I'll have an egg and tomato
sandwich on wheat.

I never sharpen the knives, but I
get them out anyway. The cutting
board is stained with last meals.

Ever appreciated the sensation
of slicing a tomato? A grooved
blade easing into ripe red skin?

It is one thing I allow myself. I
palm the fruit, wet it under the tap
and lay it down for surgery.

The juice--blood in the ocean.
The aroma of last night's tilapia
seeps through the garbage.

Suddenly, there is a clamor of ships
outside. My arms are underwater
again, anvil-crushed.

You are still asleep, but I am strong and
buoyant. I will swim for you through
a thousand morning lights.

(This is epiphany.)

___________________________

V.

My heart

                in

                     Dunkirk.

(To be continued.)

Poem for Monday, January 21, 2013

Apogee

We are at some grocery store, and I suddenly want to express
so many things.

Billie Holiday's "I'll Get By" melts out of
a dust-caked speaker nesting where wall meets ceiling.
With each strike of the piano, you drop a frozen dinner
into the shopping cart. Do you notice

our love, hidden among the stacks of mangoes?


* * *


We are at some post office, and I suddenly want to express
so many things.

Encased in glass is a set of stamps
featuring figures from Greek mythology. Helen is only a
square inch in size but gorgeous enough to redden
the Aegean. Our zip code

is lost among the smells of mail, ink, your hair.


* * *


We are at some coin laundry, and I suddenly want to express
so many things.

The Kenmore clunker rumbles under
your thighs while you finger an outdated Vanity Fair.
It takes more than two quarters in a slot to wash away
our mistakes. But the stains and spills

of yesteryear are expunged from this fabric and

We are on some moon now, far away from the sun,
           the color of jaundice,
           time a lost concept,
           I am a fatalist,
           you in a summer dress,
           and I suddenly want to express
so many things.

Poem for Wednesday, January 16, 2013

During the Flood

Two cardinals and a black-capped chickadee

fought with seedless stomachs

flew with cloud-stained feathers

to reach the bird feeder's remains.


The rain inundated everything just because

it could. Those birds

learned the concept of color, that sorrow

is relative


and meant to be shared.

Poem for Sunday, January 6, 2013

The Death of a Local Legend

He wasn't in his bed flanked by two
toothsome blonds like he said he
would be, and Elvis wasn't crooning
on the stereo. Ray Charles wasn't
wailing, either--that was his backup
plan. No half-empty glasses of scotch.
No smoke twirling sensually from a
half-lit stogie balanced on the edge of
a crystal ashtray. What kind of way
is that to go out, anyway? No, it just
happened one Sunday. He was on
his way out for some innocuous
errand--to grab a quart of milk or to
mail the check for the water bill. His
daddy's Bible was on the table by sheer
coincidence. He palmed his chest and
went down to one knee, then his back.
He fought for breath while the wind
swayed the blinds and the cuckoo clock
struck twelve. His final thought was
not his mother, the women he made love
to all those August afternoons or all the
money he made and blew. It was simply
how cool the solid oak floor felt
against the nape of his neck. Anyone
might think the same thing.

Poem for Wednesday, January 2, 2013

My Initial Indifference Regarding the Death of a Terrorist

While power walking out of a guanz in my Mongolian
countryside village, my phone rang out its contrived
Franz Liszt composition tone. Moments before, I had just
devoured a bowl of homemade noodles and mutton, and
my bowels began churning after three days of dormancy,
grumbling a dirge of discontent.


I fumbled through my right pocket. A friend with whom
I had not spoken in months was calling--a pleasant
yet untimely surprise. Walking past the breastfeeding
mother statue in front of the school, I answered. So began
the multitasking challenge from hell: exchanging pleasantries
while contracting my rectal muscles and scurrying through
the springtime desert wind.


He called me to share what was perhaps the most significant
international news of the year: Osama bin Laden had been
gunned down by US forces in a compound in northern
Pakistan. He wanted to make sure I was prepared in case
the locals sought me out to congratulate me, to ask me
questions or to express any opinions.


I cannot remember how I adverted then. I cannot
remember what color the sky was, how many children
waved at me and snickered as they disappeared behind
dilapidated fences of sod and stone. I lost mental count of the
six hundred and something steps it was to my khashaa. God,
I had counted that trek dozens of times before.


I thanked him for informing me and continued my pressured
stride, having been reminded for the first time in awhile that I
was American. I passed the five-room hospital without the
slightest tinge of vindication. I turned across from the dead tree
usurped by vultures perching with scrutiny. Instead of savoring
revenge or ruing the malicious murders that occurred that one
morning, I was simply hoping my body would not explode.


When I finally stepped through the rusty makeshift gate, I was
sweating. I laid--no, dropped--my bag against the side of the
outhouse, scrambled to untuck, unbutton and unload. Afterwards,
in a word, sublime. I regained my breath, removed some toilet
paper from my pocket and wiped while the sweat evaporated
from my brow. I squatted a bit longer then left to enter my ger.


My routine continued with washing my hands, tossing my bag
on my bed, contemplating dinner and dung for the fire. But
before the fire, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and to gaze
from afar at any nomads that might be passing by, leading strings
of their burdened Bactrian camels along an endless line of
mountains.