HIS HEAD WAS FOUND at the DRIVER'S WHEEL
(in process) Siebzehn Valley 1952
The Geologist dug up true stories.
Once there was a poor pion named Tukipetoh. He was a Popoluca, the last of the Olmecs who invented the zero four thousand years ago. The poor man and his family grew maize and squash on a small plot of jungle they owned. Land in Popoluca villages was not sold for profit. One morning before dawn Tukipetoh awoke from vivid dreams of the Butterfly goddess who was the protector of dead children. During the night torrential storms had hit the Mexican Gulf coast. The sky itself seemed to fall and great shallow lagoons formed. Tikipetoh set out in the mud with his machete to cut back the jungle on the sugar cane plantation where he worked as a laborer. Slipping on something raised up from the mud, Tikipetoh fell face down in the muck and found himself staring eye to eye with an eye the size of an alligator’s skull. Struggling to his feet, he raced through the swamp, to find the patron of the plantation. ¡jïncha! ¡jïncha! Wijn, he shouted in Popoluca. Upon examining Tukipetoh’s find, the patron sometime later told an archeologist named José Melgar who claimed the discovery, thus becoming famous. As we all know - the eye Tukipwtoh discovered was actually part of a colossal Olmec head that was carved from basalt. The head measured ten feet tall. This is a true story.
“Does anyone know why Tukipetoh was not given credit for his discovery? Four hands shot up to answer first.
“Because of the butterfly!”
“The butterfly didn’t want to be known for protecting the dead.
“Yeah, it was what she did, like living or breathing .
“No, it was the eye. It saw him. He saw it. Like four thousand years. Who does that?
Lola never got a good night’s sleep. She opened her eyes, mascaraed, lined with Maybelline. Maybelline on top of the hill why can’t you be true? She and Steve made out to Moondog, a stolen name from a blind man, when his signals bounce from the sky night waves from Cleveland, Chuck Berry being Steve’s all time favorite. Hers was Tell Me Why by The Four Aces not Eddie Fisher who stole it. The bell rang to stampede the corral of teens. Lola lingered, her arms hugging a stack of text books. She stuck a snot between page one hundred and one hundred and one of "Journey through Wordland“ otherwise known as "Journey Through Boogerland." Mister Geologist, I want to ask if there are any ancient heads buried here? You know, outside, like …. under us, now like that Tukipetoh guy found?
The golden moment. Yes! There were indeed. Not the colossal heads of his lecture, but heads that housed the eyes of the Trilobite. Both formed in stone. Something like that. He would be happy to show the copious inhabitants of the Proterozoic Age, which fluttered in large copulating numbers, leaving slithery tracks in the muck entombed for The Geologist to dig up. Trilobites were the butterflies of the ancient seas he explained to Lola, who despite her unusual curiosity seemed so out of focus these days, singing songs to herself, colored blues and railroad songs, applying Lilac Champagne lipstick by Revlon during class discussion. She had told him about Lana who purred for hours during thoughts of Granny Ana singing a railroad song with two parts that made nonsense together. Does the tune follow the heart or does the heart follow the tune? Lola was taken far away into memories not her own by its minor key tomes.
Where have you been last night? In the pines in the pines, in the pines. My husband was a railroad man. He died a mile past town. His head was found at the drivers wheel but his body never was found."
Why not?
Forget the body, look for the head. At the top, you’ll find the thousand lens eyes of a five hundred million year old three part bug staring at you the way they did the ancient Paiutes, of Old Woman Mountain, who plucked the critters from aprons of schist and strung them up as good luck charms. In Iowa City or Maotianshan you can buy one big enough for a dinner plate with steroidal vision. The Geologist easily disinterred one up for Lola. Yank up the weeds, dig for awhile and there’s an eye ball. You like it? He had divined where Trilobites waited to be rescued, several under Siebzehn's Grange Hall, and naturally, Siebzehn Valley High School in uncovered parts of the Iapetus Sea, when Montana was Poland, that sloshed over a combination of L’viv and Seventeen Valley. Seventeen? What’s what the English call Siebzehn.
What’s more, he enthused in a hail of bad breath, Lola’s home actually straddled both the Rockies and the underlying Craton. What do you think about that? He told Lola that the Crowe cabin see-sawed on a mount of crumbling fell pinched up between dominating scarp faces, thrilling uprisings of hot granite churning their devastation to sky heaven the very day the first possum saw the last pterosaur fly by. But, don’t bother to drop by. Lola’s view from the Crowe cabin's jerry-rig picture window was an pug ugly miles spread of "gumbo" clay slip when wet and in summer it’s clay grog of sharp abrasions when you grab a handful to measure the gain sizes. The Geologist says not to step on it too much, either, considering it took since Alaric’s sacking of Rome for Sebzhen’s rock to yield up anything remotely hospitable to life as we know it. Add to the clays a thin community of crispy clast sown defensively over the desert pavement. Across this vista, in every direction ran a craze of unpaved roads, including the rutted access to Crowe Ranch.
It was the dust, relic dust with exoskeletons in it, that caught in Lola's every breath. Asthma, says the nurse from Anaheim who married a soldier boy at Camp Le Fall. Move somewhere to else! Is my advice. Somewhere there is nothing to kick up. A city that’s paved over with wide streets, palm trees, and parking lots full with new model cars, those new Studebakers that are the same coming and going, You know the ones, Frenchy cafes Beefseekers Inn, buildings a mile high, and where women wear perfume to the market. A glamorous place. A place where neighbors are strangers.
They’d been going steady for, it was since her birthday that everyone forgot.
The first time he moaned her name, Oh Lola, like it was her that caused it, created it, an aching pain so close to birth. First love. Mine his together and alone filling all the time ever in earth and space. A moment defining all moments big and small.
(in process) Siebzehn Valley 1952
The Geologist dug up true stories.
Once there was a poor pion named Tukipetoh. He was a Popoluca, the last of the Olmecs who invented the zero four thousand years ago. The poor man and his family grew maize and squash on a small plot of jungle they owned. Land in Popoluca villages was not sold for profit. One morning before dawn Tukipetoh awoke from vivid dreams of the Butterfly goddess who was the protector of dead children. During the night torrential storms had hit the Mexican Gulf coast. The sky itself seemed to fall and great shallow lagoons formed. Tikipetoh set out in the mud with his machete to cut back the jungle on the sugar cane plantation where he worked as a laborer. Slipping on something raised up from the mud, Tikipetoh fell face down in the muck and found himself staring eye to eye with an eye the size of an alligator’s skull. Struggling to his feet, he raced through the swamp, to find the patron of the plantation. ¡jïncha! ¡jïncha! Wijn, he shouted in Popoluca. Upon examining Tukipetoh’s find, the patron sometime later told an archeologist named José Melgar who claimed the discovery, thus becoming famous. As we all know - the eye Tukipwtoh discovered was actually part of a colossal Olmec head that was carved from basalt. The head measured ten feet tall. This is a true story.
“Does anyone know why Tukipetoh was not given credit for his discovery? Four hands shot up to answer first.
“Because of the butterfly!”
“The butterfly didn’t want to be known for protecting the dead.
“Yeah, it was what she did, like living or breathing .
“No, it was the eye. It saw him. He saw it. Like four thousand years. Who does that?
Lola never got a good night’s sleep. She opened her eyes, mascaraed, lined with Maybelline. Maybelline on top of the hill why can’t you be true? She and Steve made out to Moondog, a stolen name from a blind man, when his signals bounce from the sky night waves from Cleveland, Chuck Berry being Steve’s all time favorite. Hers was Tell Me Why by The Four Aces not Eddie Fisher who stole it. The bell rang to stampede the corral of teens. Lola lingered, her arms hugging a stack of text books. She stuck a snot between page one hundred and one hundred and one of "Journey through Wordland“ otherwise known as "Journey Through Boogerland." Mister Geologist, I want to ask if there are any ancient heads buried here? You know, outside, like …. under us, now like that Tukipetoh guy found?
The golden moment. Yes! There were indeed. Not the colossal heads of his lecture, but heads that housed the eyes of the Trilobite. Both formed in stone. Something like that. He would be happy to show the copious inhabitants of the Proterozoic Age, which fluttered in large copulating numbers, leaving slithery tracks in the muck entombed for The Geologist to dig up. Trilobites were the butterflies of the ancient seas he explained to Lola, who despite her unusual curiosity seemed so out of focus these days, singing songs to herself, colored blues and railroad songs, applying Lilac Champagne lipstick by Revlon during class discussion. She had told him about Lana who purred for hours during thoughts of Granny Ana singing a railroad song with two parts that made nonsense together. Does the tune follow the heart or does the heart follow the tune? Lola was taken far away into memories not her own by its minor key tomes.
Where have you been last night? In the pines in the pines, in the pines. My husband was a railroad man. He died a mile past town. His head was found at the drivers wheel but his body never was found."
Why not?
Forget the body, look for the head. At the top, you’ll find the thousand lens eyes of a five hundred million year old three part bug staring at you the way they did the ancient Paiutes, of Old Woman Mountain, who plucked the critters from aprons of schist and strung them up as good luck charms. In Iowa City or Maotianshan you can buy one big enough for a dinner plate with steroidal vision. The Geologist easily disinterred one up for Lola. Yank up the weeds, dig for awhile and there’s an eye ball. You like it? He had divined where Trilobites waited to be rescued, several under Siebzehn's Grange Hall, and naturally, Siebzehn Valley High School in uncovered parts of the Iapetus Sea, when Montana was Poland, that sloshed over a combination of L’viv and Seventeen Valley. Seventeen? What’s what the English call Siebzehn.
What’s more, he enthused in a hail of bad breath, Lola’s home actually straddled both the Rockies and the underlying Craton. What do you think about that? He told Lola that the Crowe cabin see-sawed on a mount of crumbling fell pinched up between dominating scarp faces, thrilling uprisings of hot granite churning their devastation to sky heaven the very day the first possum saw the last pterosaur fly by. But, don’t bother to drop by. Lola’s view from the Crowe cabin's jerry-rig picture window was an pug ugly miles spread of "gumbo" clay slip when wet and in summer it’s clay grog of sharp abrasions when you grab a handful to measure the gain sizes. The Geologist says not to step on it too much, either, considering it took since Alaric’s sacking of Rome for Sebzhen’s rock to yield up anything remotely hospitable to life as we know it. Add to the clays a thin community of crispy clast sown defensively over the desert pavement. Across this vista, in every direction ran a craze of unpaved roads, including the rutted access to Crowe Ranch.
It was the dust, relic dust with exoskeletons in it, that caught in Lola's every breath. Asthma, says the nurse from Anaheim who married a soldier boy at Camp Le Fall. Move somewhere to else! Is my advice. Somewhere there is nothing to kick up. A city that’s paved over with wide streets, palm trees, and parking lots full with new model cars, those new Studebakers that are the same coming and going, You know the ones, Frenchy cafes Beefseekers Inn, buildings a mile high, and where women wear perfume to the market. A glamorous place. A place where neighbors are strangers.
They’d been going steady for, it was since her birthday that everyone forgot.
The first time he moaned her name, Oh Lola, like it was her that caused it, created it, an aching pain so close to birth. First love. Mine his together and alone filling all the time ever in earth and space. A moment defining all moments big and small.