Untitled ("Don't bet that there arn't people")

A mountain poem of fatigue and swagger, where class, sexuality, and religious irony are pressed into one rough declaration.

A defiant mountain monologue that opens by insisting outsiders not 'bet that there arn't people / around here that have lived / through all of them,' then drifts from aching ankles to a fantasy of finding 'a diamond / in the head / of an Appolisa' past 'the last mountain.' It ends wearing a man's clothes ('his shortest shorts / and his freshmen teeshirt') and lobbing the irreverent question 'how many times was Jesus married.'

The poem's authority is its survivorship: these are people who 'have lived / through all of them,' and the speaker stakes the work on that endurance before her attention wanders to her own body, 'My ankles hurt.' The treasure she imagines is lodged in the 'head / of an Appolisa' (an Appaloosa horse) 'way ove the last mountain / on this fiest side of the world,' a frontier-edge image that makes the search both literal prospecting and longing for somewhere past the ridgeline. 'Watch me as I write' makes the act of composition itself a performance, and the borrowed boyish clothes - shorts, a 'freshmen teeshirt' - put her inside a man's wardrobe 'to show me,' a quiet erotics of wearing what is his. The flat 'It just goes on and on / through the shades' gives the day its monotony before the closing line detonates a heretical thought against that backdrop, the kind of question a hard-pressed believer asks when scripture stops fitting her life. The dialect spellings ('arn't,' 'ove,' 'fiest,' 'Appolisa') are the persona's idiom and I have preserved them.