The Tattooed Desert

by Richard Shelton

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

by Edward Gorey

*many thanks to Matthew Burnside for sharing Richard Shelton’s poems