Listen to Brandon L. Rucker's music while enjoying this page
The Apache Indians were probably the first to set eyes on the mountain, followed by the Spanish conquistadors, including Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. He came north from Mexico in 1540 seeking the legendary "Seven Golden Cities of Cibola". "Lost Dutchman Mine" has been the quest of many an adventurer, and a place of doom to luckless others.
Visions of dust wind sprinting
as we trek across the mountain,
watching the dazed specter, who
splits the crevices, feathered cracks,
burnt umber-hued rocks.
Sunlight burning forth from the sky,
a bullet hole of purple blues, red
iron orbs melted into a chocolate sunrise.
Painted mist subduing us,
the jagged expanse etched into
our sun-glass reflections.
Imagining the weathered Indian faces
carved into the rocks, melting into the
West, as a russet auburn flood of gorges,
cavernous craters where microcosm
landslides drop.
Landmines where cacti river demons dwell,
sought for miles upon miles, hunching
over like the "Seven Golden Cities of Cibola",
after battlegrounds littered with Indian
bodies fell.
The region, conjures words of local Indians, telling
conquistador Coronado, in foreign tongue of
golden mountains, with pyramid peaks ragged, with
sounding abode churches seeping city
languages into dusty streets.
Terrified by the "Thunder God" illuminating wrath
on who's sacred ground we trespassed, while
names, utterances of our mouths, clinging to our lips, as
language wriggles in and out, while mythological tongues
put fire on our foreheads.
"The Spaniards tried to explore the mountain on their own, they discovered that men began to vanish mysteriously. Many bodies of men were discovered to be mutilated and with their heads cut off. The mountain has taken the lives of many men and women and has perhaps caused a madness in them that has encouraged them to kill each other."
A reddened Jesus resurrecting above,
encompassing us in a spiritually
bone-chilling response
Dutchman's Mine visions, while
decomposition erodes prospector's
souls, carried on by the wind.
The crossing lays out skeletal fragments,
cow skull and cactus brambles,
floating up to the surface of
stop motion air, like an O'Keefe
painting etching sand dunes.
River gorges below, blood of the River God's lip
an area forever pot marking stress, and
straining the fault line of hostile territory, with
mysterious disappearances climbing, into
the heights, a tectonic maelstrom pushing upward,
born of war whooping eruptions.
Soaring spires rise, heated smoke of ancient flame,
the powwow dance of dust on the rocks, circling,
rising to the height of 3,000 feet above, like
spiral bound smoke of ghosts, ash crackling bitter, against
ceremonial skies, while generations flood the red
clay earth.
The sweat rains in sheets on our backs, the Thunder God,
towering over the upper rock, numbing us, with
feverish shadows, the needle pass over the entrance to
Lost Dutchman's mine, a sign of the skies pursuit upon us, as
he whispered sage into our eardrums, his rough,
sandpapered hand trying to kill us.
