Our Mojave

Everything arrives at the same juncture: 
heaven. 

Convince me otherwise. 

Forget recollection – be there with me. 

The base of Hayford Peak is haunted 
in blue snow,
a sea of Joshua trees birthing 
their way to whole cliffsides 
of yellow cups and evening primrose, 
lie down.

 Forget your reaction to guilt, 
to mercy, to sacrifice:

 the moon is beyond all surprise, 
clawing atop tan crag silhouetting in the night.  

It asks all questions and answers none of them:

What do you do with where you came from? 
When once night was terror and wildness, 
now on any given hill, a choice of being.  

We will never be uncreated, 
and whether believing or not, she will 
have your eyes: 

the yellow earthdreams            
will pocket her walk as the natural lean 
towards heaven,  

for it is all anyone wants, and now 
the desert has stolen the quiet of heaven 
and I am writing my way through a life
to bring it back.

-

Desert Paean

1.  Mojave May alarms us       more throated jewels   his tonsils 
hum across the screen        like dunes outside Kelso in full 
blood moon light                     singing a wind song to xerocoles
a year of lizards            dust storms      hawk moths splitting vision 

2.     Frenchman Peak indigo at sunrise an abacus of little clouds          
blue mesa         a warming        what really can be done with his blood
a dome of yellow rock bounds    across a pine plateau 

3.     I diagnose the land             with the disease           each tumor
is a crevasse     crater   gap       small cave we cannot climb into 
I stalk bighorn sheep from atop           orange buttes: they never know. 

4.     Convince your body     this is new land     this is new health:      
it was Northeast crosswind      pollen  chemical plant smoke-blooms
stress of seven Italians in one household         a Labrador that begs     
a swampland            the riptide of the desert         is wind

5.     A name for traversing each state and learning the interstates  
fossilized knolls      aquifers        brown glaciers    and not knowing
what the body has decided:      you come to know the land more than
your own pulse     we wet our feet in water of Lake Michigan 
squat    examine the stones      I hold up my dress       it blows to you

6.     One day we will drive to the throat of the mountain          and it will eat 
us whole.         Asters: when I look at his neck, I see   his straw hat
he’s lying in a meadow of purple asters               and Medicine Bow Peak
spits snow into the wind                      a sylph about my head dangerously 
still         how far we are from the sea.