A few times each morning
the sand and plants and distant edge
lift themselves to the daily wind,
as though a train passed,
or a vessel, in a last farewell.
 
You can see everything agree
it is nothing, and settle back into itself,
from the tips of scrub branches
down through the stems into soil,
agree it is nothing. Another day.
 
There is a flat stretch of sameness
between things, the fade of color
at noon, the distances leading
equally to nothing, the dying,
and the different bands of heat.
 
Only the slits in things look out
into it, chapped surfaces of rock,
thin folds in leather lizard skin,
thin, shadowed lines in wood
where the grain is gone, split open.
 
Eyes gone, or covered all day
at the stark pulse of sky
and heat that force down into
the ground blues, sand reds,
faint greens bunched in places.
 
The traces of color pass down
through the soil into the deep mix
of shadows below, where they rest,
like sun at the end of day.
The sky is white, and then red,

remembering, like a burn.
Insects curl tight in shell skeletons,
buds of sand join into new rocks,
little toy deaths tick down.
More desert comes from the few
 
things that happen, agreed most
things should end, it all comes back,
the same stretches and pause
of heat, the moments of breath,
and shadow, and sand.

 

It is January. It is January.
Month of déjà vu.
 
All the blue sky was sky before.
Even the air is an echo.
 
The days count to seven.
The sea more like grey than ever.
 
The last week carries
an extra name in its pocket.
 
Evening is a blind date
that can't stay late,
 
the moon a coin of taxi fare
you say goodnight to.

 

This could be where God
created the world
 
The canvas is still blank
and torn in places
 
Or this could be
its end
 
Stone forests
as mad as any war
 
Stolid eruptions
in reddened crags
 
Charred horizon
A cyclops sky
 
What is more real
is what is gone
 
What is left
is the imagination
 
Spikey unlikely things
that must grow on
 
the extravagances
of sunspots
 
Stalks of cactus brushes
in rock crevasses
 
Ribbed arms of cactus
that halt the sky
Or are prisoners
surrendering to the sun
 
Or hands thrusting up
from buried agonies
 
I am seeing the desert
as assemblage
 
Mosaics Flagstone
The melange of colored sands
 
Even the swastikas
sprinkled over
 
Indian pieces
are the sun I am told
 
I am painting a
turquoise Zuni bird
 
and preparing
a silver frottage
 
of the moon rubbed
desert night