A Few Days....

....after I got back from America I got sick,
sicker than I've ever been since I was a child.
And with the sickness I had a fever and wild hallucinations
like ten simultaneous Technicolor movies,
the room crowding with competing bands;
Robbie Burns and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(I had been see his grave at Fort Sumner, New Mexico) playing Bluegrass
and the thousand voices of relatives and strangers instructing me,
and the Terminator chasing Bambi across the roof.


This Day of the Dead figure came from the old mining town of Jerome
which hangs (and sometimes doesn't) on the side of a mountain
in Yavapai County, Arizona. Jerome was described in 1903
by the New York Times as the wickedest town in the West.
But when the mining ran out it became almost a ghost town
until the Hippies discovered it in the sixties and seventies
and now it's full of galleries and craft shops, bikers, restaurants and artists.

I loved this five inches tall plastic figure as soon as I saw her.
I was moved by her dignity and defiance and sadness
and I found her very encouraging while I was ill,
though I only had a cold and she has got something much worse.