Tim Hunt

 
Still Life: Barbed Wire with Tumbleweeds (Owens Valley, California)

There was
water here, once:

orchards and farms,
the Sierras rising off to the east.

Before the lake was drained
to flush the toilets in L.A.

That feat of engineering!

And the farms dried up
and the orchards failed,

and most of the people moved on.

That is the way of things,
here in the west:

a momentary boom
that fails

and most of the people moving on—

a few,
left behind:

tumbleweeds snagged in a fence
rocking in the wind

against the strands of barbed wire.

 
Silver Mine (Tonopah, Nevada)

The twisting dark
of the mined seam—

receding down
into the hillside:

a vacancy left
by the tons of blasted ore,

pick-axed and shoveled,
hauled out

and smelted into ingots—
silver chains and inlaid

teeth, wealth.
Someone’s. Somewhere

else.

Here, the dark seam—
an absence twisting

away

as if the ore
had never been,

and the men

who worked the seam
had never been.

As if this silence