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.

She left Reno
in a satin slip
the color of hot coins
pouring from slots,
wearing chewed-up tennis shoes,
mirrors multiplying her,
the marquee burning out
letter by letter,
a hush pressed between her teeth
as if saving the last note.

I followed,
a gangly shadow,
mother’s voice in my ear:
life is not a freeway exit.
But she was the exit.
She drove west
through a glittering throat.

In Tonopah she was a waitress
with red stains on her wrists,
the sleeves tugged low,
coffee pouring thin as blood.
In Barstow she was a sun-bleached Madonna,
halo blistered, mouth lit in stained glass.
At a gas station in Needles
she shimmered into a coyote’s shadow
and slipped behind the pumps.
Everywhere,
a new disguise,
a flicker at the edge of vision.
Not the whole leap,
just rehearsal.

Casinos blinked like electric relics.
Truckers called her sugar,
greedy hands counting her ribs
as if she were a paycheck
sweating in their fist,
but she slipped away each time,
her silhouette already moulting-
a serpent skin, a smoke-trail,
a saint’s shadow burning off the wall.

By Malibu the night
had softened to velvet.
The pier at Zuma
leaned into the Pacific
like a broken rib.

She sang once-
low, cracked, unfinished-
and the slip fell from her
like the last lie.
Her body cut into the dark tide,
this time there was no disguise.

I waded in after her,
ankles bruised by rock.
The sea lit with jellyfish,
not lanterns but wires,
each pulse a warning,
each glow a wound.

Standing at the highway’s end-
no exit left,
just the Pacific’s mouth
closing around her.

Well ducks, it was the place to gather in those days.
There were ceiling fans that made one think
that Baron Von Richtofen might fly in at any moment.
I wondered whether a man wearing coveralls had to climb
up on a ladder each morning
to heave the blades into motion.

They served a concoction of fruit, gin, crushed ice,
the low notes from Hernando's Hideaway, and who knew
what else. It tasted like children's party punch
but made our high perches start to  pitch
on the rough seas beneath our jelly legs.

Down some white stone stairs, there was a blue pond
someone had stocked with mallards, as green and gold
as my jewelry. They were free to fly
but could never leave--the desert
would have turned them to cardboard.

We slept with scorpion nets. One night I dreamt
that a handsome man in a uniform of water lay with me,
told me my hair was good rope from India, and
that I had been a snake charmer
in a previous life. He kissed me and it stung.

Ah, love, there you are looking at me through your new
telescope, your young face behind the lens like an egg.
I gave up gin, and traveling, and most other things long ago.
Now I'm talking to you with my bird beak,
free to choose but forbidden to leave

except via packing box, to be sent by air mail over the dunes
to the oasis bar, c/o my younger self, cash on delivery, payable
in florins, code phrase "wing walker." The Baron will be there waiting.
___

“What is not to be had in haste, may yet echo on the grieving wind.”
— Su ****

The pallor of the desolate plain —
a wound torn by void.
Those great swathes of barren earth,
laid bare —
are my chest,
yellowed and cracked with thirst.

She holds her head high,
nonchalant —
dragging behind her a hem
as lucid and dark as eyes
that have seen through dreams.

The snowy lace, pure as accumulated frost,
stirs up dust —
like the tender light at the horizon’s edge,
trembling into dawn.

I thought it was the sweet, silken whisper
of a love just waking,
mist-drenched and dizzying…
I wandered deep into it,
entranced,
never to return.

Her steps —
mysterious as the sea’s dense murmurs
when dusk is full.

Each footfall
layered with gentle unrest,
floated
toward the dimples of innocent laughter,
ever deeper,
until freedom itself
seemed just a breath away…

And my fevered imagination
scrambled and stumbled blindly,
thrashing with futile longing.

But oh — the great ironclad of love!
Launching its voyage!
And with cannons that shattered the sky
proclaimed:

Heaven, red with blood, is boiling!
Let the burning Utopia blaze in delight!

But her steps —
her steps are also
so firm,
so forward…
As if from the unreachable gleam ahead
some force of fate
pulls her onward,
irresistible,
unmatched.

And I —
I am helpless.

Forward…
A paltry mayfly,
daring to stop
the eternal rise of the sun
with one trembling day of life.

My proud, resounding cries
were silenced,
crushed into a choking hush,
into shattered bone…

She paid them no mind.

With unbearable grace
she brushed aside the clamor —
brushed away the storms —
and moved forward.

Her heels,
cold as the blade of an axe,
hacked into my flesh.

And the rustling of her skirt
drifted farther, farther still —
until only the groans
of withered grass remained.

The moon, pale and ravenous,
devoured every ember of warmth,
and night,
black and intimate,
caressed my spine like death’s quiet hand…

I was calm —
calmer than I have ever been,
like the pulse
of the already-dead.

In vain I turned again and again
to lick the bitterness
from every grain of this earth —
each one once soaked
in the sweet sweat of youth.

And her scent, receding,
took with it
my last ray
of sunlight.

I did not leave the desert unchanged.
The heat shimmered as if reminding me that all I had beheld was a mirage, tempting as it was to grasp it tightly
in my palm.

The rumble of the charge still echoed
in my mind, my spirit fully awakened, body upright now. So many decades
of being bent and not realizing it.
My vision shifted

to the impossible becoming my reality.
The warrior women who spoke life over me, poised and unwavering
as those with wisdom often are.
Their eyes peered deeply into mine

and the dry bones were made flesh anew. Somewhere in the distance,
the little girl I once was (who had fought so fiercely to procure
my safety) waved at me

one final time. Thank you, dear
little one, for being there when I felt like I had nothing else left. You no longer have to spring to my rescue.
I can handle my battles now,

knowing that the ultimate victory
is mine through Him who strengthens me. As I left the desert, I didn't look back. I was free. And so was she. Somehow, it was enough.