You gotta watch them truckers

The White Christmas thing,
so overrated.
You know,
I mean,
really.
This holiday season, the colors
of tan and brown and
all of their spectral cousins
sounded just fine.
Southward it is, then,
on the great Highway 95.

About two inches of snow on
Mt. Grant, above Hawthorne.
That’s not good.
And the White Mountains are
more negro than blanco.
That all could change in a day.

The highway itself, which joins
Yuma with Sand Point
and wanders through Nevada
via Searchlight, Beatty, Tonopah,
Fallon and Winnemucca,
is littered with foul canisters
gleaming in the faint daylight.
Calling cards of hurried truckers
who can’t be bothered to stop
and whizz on a rabbitbrush
like the rest of us.
They drain bottles of Gatorade,
run the stuff through their guts,
and then, in what must be
a tricky maneuver
at 75 miles an hour,
refill those bottles, screw
on the lids and lob them
onto the side of the road.
Bladder blossoms, blooming
on Highway 95.
Thank you, guys!
The lady truckers, I assume,
are off the hook here.
The Gatorade bottles,
being of wide mouth,
are essential.
This stunt just ain’t feasible
using the bottles
of Aquafina or Dasani.

In this towering, sculpted canyon
in the Valley of Death
(which got its name because
one crazed white guy—
exactly one—
fucked up, got lost, croaked
in the cruel heat of 1849)
there must be every shade of tan.
There are more shades of tan here
than in any paint chip library
in any Home Depot
on Earth.
Brown is also well represented.
Fans of burnt siena would be
at peace.

Vast, sprawling, tortured, gnarled,
glumped, clumped and taffied,
shades and shades and shades
clamor to be noticed
until the sun moves
and changes them
one very slight iota.