I must have been almost crazy to start out alone like that on my bicycle pedaling into the tropics carrying a medicine for which no one had found the disease and hoping I would make it in time I passed through a paper village under glass where the explorers first found silence and taught it to speak where old men were sitting in front of their houses killing sand without mercy brothers I shouted to them tell me who moved the river where can I find a good place to drown from The Tattooed Desert University of Pittsburgh Press, February 1971
*many thanks to Matthew Burnside for sharing Richard Shelton’s poems