Even here, miles from town,
Joshua trees raise twisted arms,
like dancers locked in a song’s last note.

I lower myself,
not as a hero in the final act
but as an old father grown tired,
disc inflamed in the back,
knuckles scraped, work
too new for such an old body.

My youth spent bent in labor,
family cut away in anger.
Before I rot away in some churchyard,
I kneel with the fool’s wish
that the spring could wash it all from me.

The sun drags its red spine
across the ridge.
Stone steadies my shoulders in its cool grip
I dissolve into cloud,
a child warmed in arms of water,
its breath rising around me like ghosts.

Rain breaks, sudden and brief.
Creosote exhales its sly, eternal smell.
A cairn rises from the sand,
stones balanced without name-
its long shadow
measures this sand in silence.

Alkali on skin,
sulfur edge to air,
dust on tongue.

Gravity presses,
bone across rock,
and heat seams my back-
a mercy scraped thin,
hours from the outskirts.

A mountain hangs upside down
on the pool’s surface.
I drink not my reflection,
but the earth’s fire gone gentle.