Rendezvous
I.
A blind light stares through each mask
I’ve discarded.
It’s not the mountains that will wear me down,
it’s one grain of sand
I hardly notice
in my shoe.
I stand on the vantage where the arroyo expands
into auras,
hours that vintage into rosa y oro.
Each morning constructs agave & cholla,
a green panorama
ramifying this gravelly soil.
It doesn’t matter what I do,
what words I mutter,
or how much I doubt
any thought’s constant
estrangement:
time becomes graven in the rockface & sod. Earthfast, I’m grafted to ether.
I don’t see a thing: I see ranges of color differences of faint lumination…
Or: like colors, each thing has no existence
except as it’s imbued by what frames it.
I dawdle, I dither.
& the sky scuds out-of-focus, now ruddy
now ochre.
Clouds saunter off
then disembody.
Unriver.
Noontide erases the bride-lace around it.
Torn open, the landscape prickles with thorns, stickles & chaff.
I loom edgewise,
elsewither,
errantways
in a no-space where thunder’s born.
II.
Late spring,
a bristle of sagebrush rushes by,
down the folds of a box canyon.
A darkward golddust
at a vista:
these mesas half-erase
to gris silhouettes
in the hawk-clocked distance
where the face of evening blushes.
The road arcs over
las colinas
y los valles,
un paisaje de piedras grandes.
They effloresce.
Confess the fall
line’s minerals
each body consists of.
Strata incinerate.
Stray rags on each thorn,
such drag-ass & greasy
featherdown, oddlots,
scat & rattletrap seedpods.
All the spall going to diddly squat, unappeasable…
Atomized flyways
under which a coyote
howls its evensong…
Ocotillos balancean en la brisa
con las primeras flores de abril,
un movimiento como el cabello
de tu madre cuando ella era joven.
Los halos resplandecen cada nube.
A strong wind pharaohs
all the grime it assumes.
Haboobs have sublimed the air your whole life long.
III.
A few shades meet on the edge of the night, molting,
& the blood
has its own meter. You brood in the cold. Keep
walking
the windfaded tracks until you can’t
cut any sign
through its contour of scrub
& ash
until the stars’ demolition work harrows each crack
deep in a narrowing canyon
graced by a freestanding
arch
that’s cantilevered
over a cankering scumpool.
Foolhardy, your own hankerings can deceive you.
You wrestle from the trash & thrash back to wrack.
While fleshed lines trace the damaging flashfloods
where a slapdash mackle of slag has been fragged
through craggy channels & waxed into moqui,
indwelling swelled iron veins are razed smooth
as a hipbone
tipped on its side & dis-
mantled to socket.
Elate in the contre-jour of the dark
matter betraying the silent song
of the bats
which razor their zero
over the slipstones,
out beyond
our own erroring reason
—where sandstorms are fated, grain by grain,
to erode
any ledge
or scribble until it’s illegible.
Each step of logic
remains
one more leap
until the desert has found you.