Western

Growth

Do you hide when the night growls;

when the liquid that falls from a heavy sky

sloughs the grime

from windows,

from streets,

from my hands?

It makes all things to each other naked

as your words, washing over my face-

this, too, is a solvent

better than water.

But then,

where does what is washed collect?

What, still, is sanctified?

It is sure a purer thing

where the ground is not shy,

where your voice is not swallowed by the din,

and the sky is burgeoned

with a wetness that will fatten the summer grass.

Thunder sings in the cleansing,

giving a question, falling away with the wind,

an answer, leaving with the rain;

and both holding each the other.

This, too, is a kindness

better than faith.

Storm

It charges up in the summer, and bites;

the wind throws dust that ricochets off your teeth

and stings your eyes;

so you stay, standing in the lean-to with the horses

listening to the howl and the deafening pulse on the roof,

counting between the rain that dashes

and shatters in the dirt outside,

until it heads south in front of a sunlight tail;

so you sit and listen to the echo

and the small noises of the ground after a storm,

dazed by oases of water-filled hoofprints.

Mesa

Plait leather creaks,

sinews writhe over muscle carved.

Staccato locust click-

hot breeze ripples over

patchy tall brome

sings through the tines

of hunched cactus bundles;

sandstone burnished in the photon strike.

Dust and mud

drip and slide;

sunbreak-

riding

blood bay red

and the dirt breathes.

Bloom

Sudden stars tossed on the raiments

of a red evening,

resting in the desert air.

Woman, talk to me;

your words are thunder…

 

Cloudlings vault low

over the belly of a dreaming earth.

 

Remember this:

your hair is flowering grass

bending on a draught moon.

When you leave in the morning,

remember this:

my eyes are hewn rock

baking under streams of sunlight.