Ghost motels and alien burgers

Ghost motels and secret weapons; Nevada:

the tumbled ruins of pony express stations

wild mustangs and burros graze the sagebrush,

the ones that haven't been lassoed in the roundups.

The booms and bursting optimism,

gold and silver mines, slot machines and brothels

then the fading away, the greying wood,

the cemeteries, abandoned schools,

double-wide mobile homes, bleached and pale

ringed with necklaces of dead Fords and Chevrolets,

a clump of cottonwoods where someone's dream

rode high then died and left a dusty skeleton.

Mysteries: a gravel road that stretches up a valley

marked by a small sign that names some settlement,

some human place in the emptiness,

twelve or thirty miles beyond the horizon.

Basin and range, basin and range,

rock, juniper, and sage,

is this the Shell Range? or the Snake?

the Ruby Mountains? or just names on the map.

the Nevada Department of Transportation

has dubbed one of the roads

"the Extra Terrestrial Highway".

it fits -the asphalt skirts the notorious Area 51,

home of stealth bombers and secret military test sites.

The A'Le' Inn restaurant next to the mobile home hamlet

named after someone named Rachel, population 48,

has a tow truck parked out front beside the highway.

has a small flying saucer dangling from the hook.

The inn sells coffee mugs and t-shirts, refrigerator magnets

decorated with green-skinned big-eyed space creatures 

You can even get an alien burger with fries and a coke.

Every fifty miles or so, there's something that used to be:

the guts of a dead motel spilling out into the sand,

waffle irons and coffee pots, broken mirrors and cash registers

a chair. a lawn mower.

A winter naked tree draped

with a couple thousand pairs of shoes,

the laces tied together and tossed

high into the branches by random travelers.

At a steady eighty miles per hour,

you can see where you're going to be

twenty minutes later:

across another valley to another juniper

and pinyon-dotted mountain range

whose name is somewhere on the map

if you can figure out

which one belongs to which.