Marfa Lights, The

Are they there in the daytime

east of town on the way to Paisano Pass

rising unseen by anyone

climbing in long arcs over Mitchell Flat

candles at noon being carried

by hands never seen never caught on film

never believed as they go up the long stairs

of the light to glide in secret or dance

along the dazzling halls out of sight

above where the air shimmers like a sea

only when the curtain of light

is fading thin above the black Glass Mountains

and the first stars are glittering

do the claims of sightings begin that may

occur from anywhere facing

the removes of those broken horizons

though most of them nowadays

are likely to come from somewhere on route go

looking south toward the Chinatis

a marker has been set up by the road there

and cars begin to stop before

sundown pulling over into the lay-by

designated with rimrocks folding chairs

are unlimbered while there is still light

and positioned among the piled stones in places

expecting them as niches along

sea cliffs expect the old fishermen

tripods are set up and telescopes

they all seem to know what they are waiting for

then buses with lines of faces peering over each other at the windows once out there was the place to take

a date it used to mean something different

if you said you had been out to see

the lights but almost everybody had

seen them whether or not they

had seen the same things and were shadowed by the same

explanations there were reports

of those lights before there were cars or ranches

they were seen over wagon trains

on their way up from the valley and shining

above the bare moving forests

of cattle horns in the pass sometimes a light

would drift and swell and suddenly

shudder and fly up bursting apart from one

color to another some say

they will turn out to be something simple

a trick of the atmosphere

and some do not think they are anything

insisting that people will believe

whatever they want to in the same way

that herdsmen and cowhands in the Chinatis

for a hundred years would whisper

that the lights were the ghost of the war chief

Alsate who had been captured

and dragged off to his death and his followers

sold into slavery of course

by now there have been investigations

inconclusive until the present

telling us in our turn what we do not know

what the evidence amounts to

perhaps and how far the theories have gone

to suggest what these bright appearances

portend in the eye of the mind where we know

from the beginning that the darkness

is beyond us there is no explaining

the dark it is only the light

that we keep feeling a need to account for

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 1999
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