Wash, Sinbad, Sigurd, Elsinore, the names
Of exits and overlooks paraded, along
With repeated signs warning of deer and elk,
One leaping stag silhouette altered to seem
To be propelled by jet-fuel flatulence painted
Exiting the rump in a red and black cloud.
Humans never grow up. A thousand years
After a monk scribbled the vernacular
"Sumer is icumen in" in the margins
Of an illuminated Latin text, a hundred years
After Ezra Pound lampooned the monk
By publishing his "Winter is icumen in"
Squib, and thirty years after I first taught
With the Norton Anthology of Poetry
Including both, some local boy (I'll go
With the assumption this artist was male)
Had taken the time to paint a rocket-fuel
Fart on a remote and mass-produced road
Sign. "Bullock sterteth, bucke ferteth,"
Sure enough. A little further on, a corpse
Of a bull elk, right-on-cue roadkill, sprawled
Where the driver had dragged it, I assumed,
On the right-hand rumble strip, and an eagle
Glared at me, golden-eyed, from a perch
On the haunch over entrails. Black Dragon,
Ghost Rock, Lone Tree, Salt Wash, Blood
Eagle. We know that our names never mattered.
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