Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?
or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?
Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?
Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth?
declare if thou knowest it all.
       Job 38: 16-18

Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,
With only one fair spirit for my minister.
That I might forget the human race,
And hating no one, love her only.
       Lord Byron,Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

I walked alone into the waste
in search of rivers—not a taste
of water could I find
to liquidate my mind.

Under the sun in vanished lakes
alive with scorpions and snakes
I sought within my soul
her limpid watering hole.

The mogollón once hunted here
as piñon pines disclosed the deer
but now not even bones
remained among the stones.

Scattered beads and the odd spearhead
my visionary soul misled;
the moment was my home
and I was free to roam.

Burial caves of ash and silence
spoke in tones of bygone violence—
grinding stones lay broken:
her archeological token.

I found a *** within a niche
still balanced well, despite the pitch
as if the owner’s urn
awaited her return.

Amidst the fragments, free at last
in potsherd patterns of the past
I followed ancient streams
through arid zones and dreams.

Exploring a dry riverbed
unraveling her golden thread
while stepping off a ledge
descending from the edge,

I almost trod upon a snake
and quick adjustment had to make.
Reluctant viper-battler,
I flinched. It was a rattler.

As my right foot continued down
I saw the scales and dusty brown;
Mere inches from its head
the imprint of my tread!

The serpent was too cold and slow
to strike a poisoned morning blow
The sun still in the east—
I swerved and missed the beast.

The desert’s charm advanced from there;
She showed me sights I barely dare
to tell lest I sound singed . . .
My mind she so unhinged.

I stood before the gate of vision
rapt in shadowed indecision
gazing in the maw,
unsure of what I saw:

A ruined mineshaft’s empty grin
that mocked and whispered: “Come within.
The words of Job are here
in wisdom born of fear.”

Necropolis; a gaping  portal…
Feeling less than weakly mortal,
deep I stared inside;
allured yet terrified.

A passage to the depths of dread:
the Book of Job, the sleeping dead.
I barely now recall
yet understood it all…

Still thirsting through her arid land
divining truths in shifting sand
I ventured on in vain,
beseeching God to reign

The javelinas mocked my quest
beguiled me onward, further west
where Dutchmen hide their gold
and Apache tears are sold.

Her rainbow shades and distant mesas
silhouetted, paint her face as
nobly as the lands
her presence still commands.

Her beauty smiled: a virtual face
of glyphic pre-Columbian grace
decentralized desire
in sublimated fire…

She led me to the springs of life
my moonlight maid and desert wife;
my nights upon the mountains
in search of spectral fountains.

Ex-nomad of the mythic west
my unfound treasure now confessed;
her deserts had me smitten…
for her my poem’s written.

The city spreads
The wild displaced
Some species gone
Without a trace
We move along
At such a pace
We lose our world
This human race

A Trasher sits
Upon a rail
In search of bugs
With flirt of tail
Grey-brown body
Curved blackish beak
He will find
The food he seeks
While he rests
So smooth and sleek
I find the wild
I take a peek
Into a world
Where harshness picks
The hardy ones
In desert sticks
As he peers
With yellow eye
He has his place
Twixt earth and sky


SoulSurvivor
(C) 12/31/2016

thirty years
since Mark gunned you down
thirty years, passed
like a long sleepless night
that ends with taunting morning light
no brilliant sunrise grandly pronouncing
a glorious new dawn of man
although that would have been your plan
with your entreaties to give peace a chance
and imagine, imagine, imagine

now I kneel in this rain gray park
like a reject from some holy ark
a pilgrim in doleful disappointed pose
after seeing what your earthly brothers chose
was not to imagine a world of peace and love
but to wear reality like a cast iron glove
making mockery of your martyred chants
proceeding like a billion scurrying ants
deaf to your childlike pleas

across the soaked soil where your ashes lay
yesterday and today…and tomorrow
I feel the soggy sorrow
that you would have felt
if you could still see
all the rage of humanity

gone heaven's blue palette,
pocked with whiffs of white cloud,
her last day, the sky wore only winter's grey,
she a gossamer gown, soon her shroud

an ancient arterial breach had filched
her gift of speech--her hearing, too, had
yielded to the years, though her sight was still keen,
and memory’s vault stored all she had seen:

a world at war, a man on the moon,
a child born and leaving her nest, too soon  
a husband in the cold ground, she yet longing
for the sound of his voice  

now her daughter sat vigil at her side, stroking her
ethereal white hair, her plum veined hands: her touch,
her smile, the last language she would know,
completing life’s gratuitous circle  

her final thoughts returning to her child in the cradle,
a pink, round innocence, when she spoke the same to her
with a mother’s soft touch, the easy curve of her smile  
so few suns ago, it seemed, so few

every night, before bed,
a simple ritual: he walks to the foyer
and drags the deacon's bench to the door
to keep intruders at bay

has been this way, since
the day he read "In Cold Blood"
and realized what uninvited guests
can do under a god's watchful eye

the belly of the bench holds every bible  
he has ever owned in his four score years
save the one by his bedside, where it sits as sentinel
against other imagined foes and woes  

though he is long deaf, those
who would defile him can yet hear, and
the righteous moan of the bench on the hardwood
would give them pause

or so the old man believes;
as if a simple sound could be so profound
to tip cosmic scales in his favor, save him
from the tyranny of evil men

this very night, before bed
he takes the same walk, shoves the same  
weighted wood against a locked door,
a simple ritual

others in the ****** ascended
to their white, breathing heavens
one by one, as if saying goodbye,
to them, was a solitary act

leaving him alone,
on the high branch--he did not fall
when gusts shook the oak, though
during stillness, he dropped

to the next leafless limb,
there waiting for him patiently,
drenched in sunlight that made
the crow's coat glisten  

soon clouds blocked the sun,
downdrafts pounded the tree;
he did not fall, until
the skies cleared    

then, to the lowest limb
he descended, now but feet above
a blanket of leaves, soon
to be his bed

other creatures would come, communing
with him in their way: his flesh becoming
their flesh, a sacred chemistry for all life,
after its pitiless descent to death

deep in the warren
they feel safe from the treachery
of my carnivorous calling

but I can use the shovel,
that terrible tool of modernity--after all,
'tis a favorite of grave diggers

a few scoops in the dank soil
and the rabbits are vulnerable to my attack:
a simple bashing of twitching skulls

my hands driven by a hunger
they satisfy with grasses in summer,
twigs, roots in winter

I wish my needs were so meager
my appetite so abstemious--but I crave
blood fresh flesh, torn from the bone

without their sacrifice, I must seek
bigger beasts, long dead, cellophane sealed
and put on ****** display

or become a vegan and ground great grains,
boil lazy legumes, and feign a higher nobility
in what I eat and excrete