Villanelle (avec Evel Knievel)

Through personal upheaval . . . —

at almost unreckonable

expense (“I’m not a daredevil”),

y, through bighorn country (“I’m an explorer”), to snort fumes, spit gravel,

cross a power line . . . lights out. “All rise . . . ;” as “Awful” Knoffel

(“the bondage of riming”) appraised his cellmate, the jailor pondered “Evil . . .;”

the man himself, meanwhile, would set the record (his first civil

disobedience) straight, sprung on that Wide World’s now archival

airings, he wipes his eye, and takes a knee; unshaken foil

of the well-oiled grandstanders, wrecked street rodders, Great American Novel-

ty Acts that made the Flyover Circuit (an all-night drive-in’s high vol-

tage sign flashed into view . . . “Car Hop”) his thrill-ridden victory lap—et voil-

á—nostalgie de la Butte notwithstanding, the earthmover engineered aval-

anche rolled him to rodeo, snowballed to ski jump, to ice hockey (check), going five whole

hot minutes per shift in big-game poaching, short-term insurance, the road-rundown travel-

ing horsetrader stabilized, arced, à cheval, on his Triumph, a nouvelle-mechanophile-

icon-on-velvet, as rendered to Caesar’s, sun-bronzed in the shade token obel-

isks threw to foreshadow what (forging ahead) fairly leaped like an anvil-

struck spark above Snake River Canyon (the primeval scheme of, as tribal

myth cycles depict it, Coyote—a moment of magical thinking) in freefall:

uncanny new valley, our national nightmare, a cold streak as blue as the Ford Oval