Empires. John Balaban
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on the edge of the high prairie,
up by I-25, the inmates are rising off
their roosts at San Miguel county jail
where the jail log reads like catechism:
Criminal Sexual Penetration in the first degree. Assault with
the intent to commit violent felony. False imprisonment.
Extortion. Unlawful taking of a motor vehicle. Conspiracy.
Burglary of a structure. Contributing to the delinquency
of a minor. Kidnapping. Conspiracy to commit Aggravated
Battery. Aggravated DWI (7th offense). Possession of
drug paraphernalia. Driving on suspended revoked license.
Probation Violation: Possession of marijuana, Possession of
Methamphetamine. Aggravated stalking. Aggravated battery
on household member, resisting, evading, violation of a
restraining order, obstructing an officer. Vehicular Homicide,
Aggravated DUI, Open Container, Reckless driving. Assault
with a deadly weapon. Assault with intent to commit a
violent felony, with intent to commit mayhem.
The key word here is “mayhem,” spreading through
the internet airwaves across the vast Llano Estacado
where mountains break into mesas and scrub,
dotted with piñon, cut by arroyos and twisty creeks
and a web of old footpaths made by ancestors.
And where the internet’s thousand channels
are offering their social contracts, so
whether you are watching from prison, or at home
in your double-wide, or in the sleep cab of your semi,
or in your townhouse at the city’s edge, or at Urgent Care,
the local laundromat, or in a bar that never closes,
wherever you are watching, you are probably just sitting
(and doing this a lot) tuned to hucksters selling
vacuum cleaners and Jesus, channel by channel:
#9012: Puppy Pooping in the House?
#9013: Thick Hair Guaranteed
#9014: Rev. Run’s Sunday Suppers
#9015: Suffer from Lower Back Pain?
Mayhem being confusion turned to violence or lassitude.
But whether in the lockup looking out,
or among the hardworking folk of the Llano
in adobe-and-stone compounds and corrals
in, say, Ojitos Frios, Tecolote, or Villanueva,
when you see the rain dropping its dark curtains
over the vast plain, some Spenglerian twinge of memory
must arrive … of the massive adobe pueblo at Pecos,
of Coronado with his armored men on horses,
or, later, as the centuries stood still and Spanish dreams collapsed,
of trading with Comanches and learning to hunt buffalo
charging bareback into the stampeding herd with lowered lance,
shoving it into a thundering beast until it stumbled and crashed down
with all its wealth of meat, tallow, bone, and hide. A barrel
of buffalo tongues for the Viceroy in Mexico. Cibolero,
Buffalo Hunter. From cíbola, Spanish for “bison,” from Zuni, tzibola.
Cibola, the city of gold that was never found.
GODS AND EMPIRE
1. XENOPHANES FLEES BEFORE THE PERSIANS
If horses and oxen had hands and could draw pictures,
their gods would look remarkably like horses and oxen.
Xenophanes of Colophon, ca. 570–480 BCE
All day we trudged north along the Aegean, cold rain
squalling, whipping up whitecaps, churning sandbars,
eating the beach, rocking pines, hissing sand-sleet.
But the hardest storms came at night, scouring us
huddled in dunes as strikes of violet light flashed
off the cliffs, igniting our faces when thunder boomed
and we were caught out not by pursuers, but by the gods
the soldiers whined, as they crouched under leather shields,
like dogs in the deafening downpour. By morning,
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