Dusty Acres

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