Under a faded wooden soda crate filled almost

with twenty-three dusty amber bottles;

in a slanted, half-collapsed

cardboard box; among cracked terra cotta pots

and an oily, filth-encrusted hydraulic jack,

I found the plaster cast of a man’s erect phallus.

It was not unimpressive in its way,

though possessed finally of ordinary dimensions,

neither a pornmaster’s swag nor the Dillinger of myth.

I thought about it hard, so to speak, and held it up

and noticed at the base—a sort of scrotal blob

mashed down flat—words:

‘Abner & Daisy May, Baker, Oregon’, and a date.

And what a date it must have been. ‘December 9, 1941.’

Men were lining up to kill and die

for all the reasons you and I know even now made sense

a little, as much as things like that ever do.

And here was this thing among a host of other useful tools,

but it was what I wanted.

Surely these were not their real names, neither his

nom de guerre, the halfway prettified

euphemism she might have given to what it was

they memorialised that day and made the most of

before he left. And surely she was not entirely the flower

he would have whispered to, nor even the verb

her there-inscribed middle name asked before they did

this thing that might well have outlived them both.

I assure you, it was hard

buying it I mean, there being both the blue-haired proprietor

and no price tag either.

‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘where did you find this?’

and all I did was point, wordless, while she swaddled it

in a wad of newspapers without ever once

letting her fingers touch its surface,

then shoved it in an old grocery bag: one dollar.

Fifty miles north I stopped where Joseph Canyon

opens out a thousand feet deep to the east.

It was not December but March. The canyon walls were

adorned with a billion early balsamroot blossoms,

almost daisy-like, an unsullied buttery yellow.

My first thought was to hurl it like a hand grenade

down onto the scree and talus

just to see it explode, but I couldn’t do it.

Instead, I followed a deer trail down, and another after that,

deeper into the canyon than any arm ever could have thrown it,

and in the shade of an ancient, enormous yellow pine

twice scribed by lightning from crown to the ground

buried it in a cairn of jagged but stackable basalt.

But not before holding it, presenting it before me,

as I thought he might have, and holding it also

as I believed she would, and even, I confess,

offering it, before I left, in honor of them who made it,

more than one goodbye kiss.