Pictures of snake dancers
chiseled on

the east rock. “Three-quarters
of the ones they used

were rattlers,” Stephen says. 107 degree
heat narrows

into nettle. Underfoot,
the softest

sand ever: faded red
grains so tiny that

even when you crouch
and scoop them up you can’t isolate

one from the others, anymore
than we can extract the tortoise shell’s

thickness from the shell. “No
walking in the desert now”

Lynn’s mother would have proclaimed
if here when Lynn ordered, “Look

at the buzzard” as it circled
in the distance. The sky

isn’t blue, it’s
efflorescent. Equilibrium:

belly full
of moth larvae, the whiptail’s

motionless in its burrow. Sun-
lured, Lynn says

“I love it here.” An arid wind
blows through sandstone holes, howling

further south where the trail
doesn’t go.

One pill and nothing matters anymore. It’s dead
out there. Rocks
and beyond them a cactus
with a purple flower, the inner
you. An insomniac belief wanders
Los Vidrios, realizing
how wrong it was. A rhinoceros beetle
drags once immortal death home.

The pill wears off. The mind climbs the ladder
to the old cliff dwelling south of here.
Where Geronimo rides, the wind in the horse’s wake
lifts sagebrush off the ground:
mind exercising its telekinetic powers.

Still here, you play
with my earlobe
when I kiss you.

Further south, the pronghorn’s numbers dwindle,
the dirty sky draws closer to the ground.

Don’t tell me about the fucking desert, Stephan shouted
south of Los Lunas.
The cactus flower’s yellow, deeper than the sea.

Insects whine. Buzzards circle
the dead dog.

In the arroyo, there are other arroyos, the wind howling
and lonely
in all of them.

Not a drunk Navajo for miles or a ghost horse’s hooves kicking up dust.
This is no movie. Just the dry
rainless miles.

Stephan sold industrial pumps on the road out of town.
Some evenings he loved to drive north toward the mountains.
Lyn and I fucked for hours when he did.

1
A voice so small
an ant carries it
through grass
as the clover listens
to a twang close enough to silence
to make dogs lift their ears.


2
Los Lunas comes to me,
a few syllables transported
by a dusty wind,
a sound as intricate
as sagebrush woven
into braids that hang
from the corn mother’s head.


3
Hot breeze from further south --
a bee buzzing
near the yellow cactus flower.

In her voice I hear the sunlight, how
it gives its password to the desperado
who killed the sheriff in a bordello where the sex
isn’t cheap and neither is the posturing
required to forget what happened to Geronimo.
“I’m a middle child, I can’t take sides,”
another voice says.

4
What sound is this?
An iris’s petals opening?
The Grand Canyon being formed?
Or could it be
her finger’s noise, the soft scraping
it makes, sliding in and out
of my rectum as I fuck her while reciting poems
composed before words were concocted yet?


5
I look at the cabinet door, how the beveled
line near the top forms a ridge like the one
Luzinski’s grandfather once trudged along
each dawn, heading for the mines
while, further south, a Peruvian
sold violets to cowherds visiting their hospitalized uncles
in a world where the only meaningful language
was this: the sound of heron wings flapping
in the Virgin Mother’s vagina at time’s onset.

Wherever I go, I hear my lover’s voice.
“Mi compañero, we are dangerous,” she says.
She is right.

Quiet as the white hairs
on the luna moth’s
body, Arizona’s drizzle,

a tiredness more delicate
than breath. So close
it comes: the sweet chill. Tiny bumps

form on the forearm. In
the interrogation center, tied
to a chair, I write

silence’s words in the air
with a tortured man’s spit blood.
Be quiet

you said my first day
here, then whispered, No, no
I want to be your lover instead. Do you
mean it? I asked. A few days later

you broke
my nose with a brick, then
kissed me on the lips. Remember? It

doesn’t matter now. You
loving me quietly tonight
is all that counts. At last,
I fuck your true body, coming
in my hand.

There is no Arizona. Not one
with a yellow cactus flower that can be seen
from the little house
at the desert’s edge. Let’s drive

to Los Lunas I might say while glancing
at that yellow flower
if I lived there
which I don’t. There’s no Arizona in which

we can get married like we planned. There’s only
a fake one with a motel where a man
who might have been our wedding priest is found,
throat slit, sitting on a toilet, head

thrown back. The cops gag: he’s been dead
for weeks. In the afternoon heat, flies
whine, pieces of the desert’s mind
detached from the real. This

is where drinking tequila, I send a telegram to Baal’s acolyte
standing inside the vulture’s beak. The sun’s brutality
tells no parables. The lizard’s eyeball says
Arizona now is only what amnesia makes of it.

A perimeter the mind can't cross,
there they are, barren and austere.

Only the heat outwits them, its haze a flock
of gray birds lifting them
back a little further so there's more room for us to go
in and out of the casinos.
Through an alley door, into
a sultry song's midday dark.
As Rachel sings, I listen from backstage.
The last time I saw her: ten years ago when
as now
no known highway connected keyboards and bass
or the scatted sounds that brought
clinking ice cubes to a halt; even
the jazz haters were afraid to make a noise.
It doesn't really matter if I understand
she sings
It doesn't really matter if he's still my man.
Doesn't matter until she makes it matter, her cheekbones
in the piano-taunted light
petroglyphs carved in red sandstone east of the Moapa River, telling us
how the long-gone soon becomes the just-appeared.
At the ends of streets, mountains
disappear where ex-ranchers
with gnarled hands
play blackjack on sidewalk tables.
Among them, Isaiah, home at last, sips tequila and gazes
at the desert, remembering how
years ago he walked out there
with God as all around them
stones burst into flame. Days later
smoke still rose from the blackened land
as the hawk screamed and the jackal, waking
in God's lap, announced
"My child Isaiah has shown the world
things that he himself doesn't understand."

Hot wind through
shrub-thick eyebrows. And what
is that, the Moapa River whispering
in his ears, far

from the rocks they call
the stone beehives? Efforts that produce
no good result, two flesh knobs
stick out
of half sleeves. Even

the legs have gone auf Wiedersehen. The knees, albino
turtle heads, emerge, blunt
and blind, from khaki shorts. The little man, all
chest and skull, sits
on a box, drinking in

Mojave light
outside Harrah’s. “Should we give the Lord”
the corner evangelist intones
“a fattened Elvis calf
barbequed on a stick
in the sandstone wilderness?” A man

in Marlins ball cap stumbles

drunk into the crowd.  The braided girl

looks at him 
as he disappears into the light
 
her eyes create.    Holy nowhere balanced on the tip
of a rock nettle’s thorn
where the hot wind blows
through buildings built
from the brontosaurus’s broken backbone.  And here
 
the manly man.  All
trunk and head
and a khaki-covered bulge
between his half-gone legs.  Holy
lonely cock of old persuasions, cock
on a box. At last, the spinning
roulette wheel stops.   

Demetria, why you sitting by the dry riverbed?
Tell me where Rodrigo's Market went.

What you mean you got a thorn in your calf
from a walk you didn't want to take?
Do me a favor: imitate
with your tongue in the air
the sound a spider makes
dragging its belly through dust.
You doing that used to make us laugh.

Hey, Demetria! where's
the arroyo near which the peach tree grows?
Did your grandson moan vespers yesterday?
You take honey in your cactus tea?

My wife Julia's dead
so I returned
but no one's here.

I lived in Los Lunas, then Mesa,
now this is where I am.
Like a tortoise plodding into the hot wind,
I come to you.

Demetria, you remember me? -- Eduardo, Carmelita's boy?
Tell me, why was my father killed?
And when?
And how?
And when he was buried
did the nuns grieve?