Best Poems - Journey

I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business,—just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there. 

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.”

The Navajo word for unleaded was not
the most absurd thing on my mind
that arid evening as we rolled
into the fever-colored hills
of Monument Valley: I had been 
scaring my five months pregnant wife
with a Reader’s Digest real life horror
—a Mormon sedan broke down in the desert,
summer, the whole godfearing family
having to chew melted crayons, tire rubber,
drink each other’s piss and finally 
slaughter their old chihuahua—
and now, with the fuel tank’s empty signal
lighting up like a bad cowboy-movie-sunset,
I was sorry for passing Last Chance
This and Last Chance That,
but sorry was not enough, I needed
a minor miracle and I got three:
all of them Navajo and not a one
over eight years old, chasing
a bald truck tire across the highway,
slapping it wobbly as if it were
a sick black goat or a priest caught
buying tequila with last Sunday’s tithes.
I hit the brakes and jumped out
onto the twilight asphalt, shouting
—my wife hissed ‘Be nice!’—shouting
‘Over here, I need to show you 
something!’ The car shuddered slightly
and died.  The Navajo kids edged up
suspiciously and why not: I was
the only gringo around and I was tearing 
through the back seat mess for a camera,
they probably thought, but what
was to prevent me from swinging around
with a knife and adding three more scalps
to the annals of genocide?
But it was a frisbee I produced,
the old worthless-trinket-trick
with a twist: a whistle behind it
was our old hound who (I lied)
was the unofficial frisbee-chasing
champion of Colorado.
And despite his broken teeth
and hips that shimmied with arthritis
he put on a world-class display,
snatching sand-skimmers, long range bombs,
kicking up his bad legs like a puppy
and fetching that orange disk back to me
like it was a sun he wouldn’t let sink
until everyone agreed to make his title
official.  Which we did amid much
ceremonious laughter and chatter,
trading names, quick stories,
all the invisible commerce of friendship.
They touched my wife’s ripening belly,
pointed to a butte glowing in last light:
‘The first people were born up there.’
The desert was stealing our shadows
while we talked.  I asked my tourist favor:
the oldest said if we pushed the car
a little way, there was a hill
curving down to a Texaco.  For thanks
I gave them the frisbee and the young one asked
‘Can we keep the dog too?’ Was this
how disappointment came into the world,
an easy question chasing a hard answer
into the darkness? The dog sat grinning
with exhaustion, my wife winced
and looked away.  Shadows bigger 
than any of us were listening as I knelt
and looked into the boy’s black-bean eyes:
‘That dog’s not worth ten dollars—
he’ll die in a year.  Let me buy 
him back for five.’  He understood.
A minute later as the car glided downhill
I thought five dollars was cheap 
ransom for such a narrow escape
from bitterness.  I let out a whoop
and imagined cowboy harmonica music
swelling over the whole fading-to-black scene,
I was that glad.”