The tundra desert
Wild and damned
Dusty acres of promising hurt
A cemetery peace
That kills the unfortified pride of convenience
The hills, near and noble,
Show none of the telltale signs of life -
The green pines polyestered by controlled burns -
Only the detritus of ground squirrels and jacks
And, sometimes, their gutted remains
Tumbleweeds and stark black ravens
Coyotes and saguaros
The twisted Joshua tree
With its rough hewn trunk of thorny sinews
Gnarled boughs like bearded necks and prickly death heads above
Flies and ants and yucca moths
And dozens of miles of flat arid sand
Old dead tires surround the fence posts in piles
And the wood cross stands where something
God knows what
Is buried
But the people are the kind who would tell you
If they knew
Life springs forth from the homestead
Working people, tired people
And children who know nothing of work
To pitch iron shoes at galvanized posts
To run dogs in endless circles
To mine the sand for common antiquities
Treasures of buried rubbish from long ago
To criticize God’s paintbrush
The separation of colors, the orange, red, vermillion
A tapestry of sunset on a one hundred mile afternoon
To live the solitary promise that deadness brings
The two smoking barrels of urbanity
And suburbanity
Have discharged those misshapen
And grizzly-haired, those of redder hue
Sojourners and naturalists
Hippies and nudists
Drunkards and libertarians
Those filled with wanderlust and a desire to live
Within their means
To this northern barren
This land of freedom
The rivers run north here
Not south
Resurrection in the vastness of the sky
And green grass grows up amidst the golden foxtails
The dusty roads lead farther into renaissance
Than most will dare to go
