Pipe Dream

[Isis]

In poems like this where the linebreaks and the stanza breaks serve as guidance or breath, it sometimes takes a few reads to get a hang of the poem, to figure out the logic of how those things are guiding the poem. In some poems that look like this one on the page, at least at first glance, the stanza break often stands in for a beat, a breath, or a period; each stanza its own thought. (And then, sometimes, it doesn't, like in "Poem" by William Carlos Williams). Anyway, when I first read this poem I was expected each stanza to be its own idea for some reason, rather than beats/breaths breaking up two long, continuous sentences. I think some of the confusion I had reading the poem comes from that. Other moments where I get lost might come from the condensed language.

The badlands are split
along the spine of
an anchor cast At first I saw this stanza as its own, separate thought, and I was really confused by "an anchor cast" - an anchor cast where? Why? I imagine the badlands as dry, so "anchor" seemed to be a word from another atmosphere, another poem. Anyway, reading your explanation below I see that this continues as one sentence. But I'm still wondering about the anchor cast that allowed iron centipedes to chase the frontier. I imagine it's railroad, or maybe just the spikes driven in that hold the tracks to the land. I can kind of imagine railway cast across the land; is "anchor" meant to imply heaviness? of something holding something else down? I think there's a lot tied up in this description that's kind of hard to unpack, which is why I got lost here -- and I bet why others did as well.

so iron centipedes I'm imagining "iron centipedes" as 19th century trains. The image is very Wild Wild West though - sort of comical as it is intimidating.
could chase their
dead frontiers -

they run faster than
their arms can grab. again, it took me a moment to see this as the iron centipedes/trains
Overall, the first sentence/section of the poem shows me a landscape criss-crossed by railroad tracks, and gives me an impression of dryness, of damaging greed. But those are general impressions - not sure if that's what you were going for, or if I was missing something more specific in the beginning of the poem. The idea of science/tech imitating the natural world as you mention in a later post didn't come through as strongly to me when I first read the poem. I see it in "iron centipede", but that seems like a twisted vision of the natural world to me… I wonder what would happen if you stressed the idea of technology borrowing or imitating natural things? If more things, like the "anchor" of railroad tracks across the landscape, were instead described using words that connote the living or natural?

-

what meekness
remains is hollowed
in the trunk

of a horn blare I think the contrast here is interesting, meekness vs. a horn blare. But I'm also having a hard time figuring it out. What meekness remains … where? In the badlands? In some other landscape? Is "in the trunk of a horn blare" meant to imply that that the horn blare is huge as a trunk, or that hollowed out trunks become horns in the voice and orchestra of the landscape? I can imagine lots of stuff going on here, but feel like as I imagine I drift from the intention of the poem. This could be a good part of the poem to mess around with, maybe to try and clarify. I sometimes like breaking rough parts of a poem down into prose sentences if I'm having a hard time making something clear, fixing syntax, word order, or whatever, and then putting the linbreaks back in.

bushes fainting in
the mad rush Again, I wonder what mad rush … the rush for monetary gain shown to us in the first section of the poem? Or the rush of the horn blare?

until everything
could only grow
pretending as if

they dreamed to
be degenerate
skyscrapers.
the bushes/the landscape dreaming it's the city is interesting; I think "degenerate" in the last image is important, but it seems kind of mysterious to me.

I agree with previous commenters that there's more to explore here.
I hope this is helpful! I'd be happy to discuss more or look at a revision.