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poem by Heather Hummel
Ghost Town
“Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.”
--Excerpt from the journal of a young girl
moving to Bodie, California.
People leave this ghost town cursed:
a scrap of wallpaper in their pocket,
a nail pulled from their shoe,
a button, a coin, a flower, frittered away
for memories’ sake
and thirty years of bad luck dogs them.
Bodie had its heyday;
my husband and I believed
in the veins of gold
thick enough to make us all
free and easy.
The only thing easy around here
is the way night slips out of joint
and someone dies in a duel, a lynching
or a mishap with dynamite or a hatchet.
Too many misstep above the void
of a mineshaft. We’ve perfected
cyanide leaching, hydroelectric power and
a penchant for human disaster.
I look to God in the too small church
for such a big city, and then I yearn
like all the women,
after the hops in Annie Padgin’s yard,
the only greenery to continue
straggling back from the unrelenting weather.
Perhaps the wild iris purples
the streamsides, but
who can love a blossom that loves cow shit so?
Fear endures, tough as jawing jerky:
time to time my husband disappears
into a China town opium den,
or Virgin Alley to visit
the Beautiful Doll, Madame Mustache, and Nellie Monroe
or, worse still, maybe,
a whirl at the roulette table
that means little firewood
or sugar for the long winter.
So many sins for the taking:
where it is hard to make a living
it’s harder still to make a living well.
One thing sure to bring the everlasting:
winter, when snow piles up to the church steeple,
and disappears the ten commandments
in ice and drift.
People crave desperately:
lard for the biscuits and potatoes to thicken the soup.
When it finally comes, the song
of coyotes drifting in with the haunting
scent of sage
you know relief
some kind of relief, however clipped
spare or dizzying,
the heavy load of life has lifted.
For some time into spring everyone stutter steps,
overcorrecting for the missing heaviness.
Listen, I pray
as I work the dry soil
hoping for a single solitary
rose, morning glory, or pansy even—
for goodness’ sake
not another thistle.
Who would you be,
the one armed sheriff, the prostitute,
the miner 6oo feet underground, six days a week?
I mend what I can, and try
to sustain a husband and home
but little joy is made
with a pantry bare but for
a few tins of coffee, Spam, and fruit cocktail.
Desolation: the hillsides are rock, not ribboned
with endless gold. People up and go
everyday, this town is becoming littered
with empty homes and boarded up shops.
Coyotes leave droppings on doorsteps,
the sawmill serrates the whistling wind:
little left but dreams turned to mayhem, and
abandoned.
Volume 0.1/Next
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