In A Desert

In a desert, the Mojave grasses narrow canyons, ice cream colors, deep walls, five springs on the Amargosa, River along China Ranch, date farm in a pocket of psychedelic melt, tongue first, glacier lake obsidian shelf 600 feet walking to neopolitan shores, wake up, hot water,
splurge dissolve, in a desert

coyote stalks your walk as you as you visit the burned out tamarisk grove (invasive species, you see), howls bouncing from rock to rock, holes of glacier hollow, are you frozen, are you heat-stroked, are you for real?
A remaining tree, for the nesting owls, mucky waterhole

Tecopa Hot Springs, ancient water, mud towers
Shoshone, woolly mammoth and 12 million year old camel tracks
old cemetery, babies buried at the base of wind-howl mud walls,
miners' dugouts in limestone cliffs

in a desert, your passion passes the sand dunes, stirred to dust, rain visits from the north, and swirls to the east
the tone of voice is dry, the weeping never this exhausted

the sunset hallucinates mountains to millions of tiny folds, your future face
colors and rainbows and pallid dirt, it never did care, although it cradles you with illustrious visual sweets, before you black out, smothered by stars

In a desert, this is the northern Mojave.

c. 2008 Ruth Nolan