Camels grazing off I-70 amaze me
and everyone who pulls eyes from 70 mph.
Five miles east of exit 313, lounging
beside a barn if Mercury's toppled 60,
eating hay looped barrel-like under wind –

mills and wind as if they were regular cows,
but elevated and ungainly and sand-pocked,
camels spit at each other, flies, and cars
from nasty mouths. Not far away, two women
and one man have separately shown me a crowd

of blue herons that yearly nest in one tree,
birth to death, close to camels. The trips
to the herons came under cover of knowledge –
I needed to learn — but meant someone must love
the desert to transport camels so far from dry

homes to prairie, someone else must love herons
hard, farmer and farmer's sons kept from razing
the high-arching cottonwood to grass, and someone
must still love Mick Jagger, as Exile on Main
Street is absent from Manhattan, KS' Wal-Mart,

where every cassette's teetering last chance rock-
bottom prices. Camels, herons, and I have to
roll tumbling dice without a full band, pickled
in a rented Taurus on Houston Street, a street
I haven't seen in years, a street that says drive,

if you want, until dawn, drive, if you want.