Desert Highway, New Year's Eve

A quiet brush of the apocalypse,
a splash of orange behind the low clouds
bathes her skin as she steps down the canyon,
echoes muffled underneath her soles.

A sandstorm is coming and the desert waits
to grow tighter in the bleeding dusk,
the short trees to bend, invisible currents
to churn dust from the mouths of craters.

He sits on the ledge, too distant to hear her,
her coat in his lap. The chrome of their wheels
rusts to brown in the canceling shadows,
the tire treads scratching a wavering road.

He swallows, rubs the sweat on her collar
as she sinks away from him down the valley,
watches the muscles flex in her shoulders
and push back the cold. I just need a walk,

she whispered to him. Can you stay behind
and guard the camper? She stretches now,
displays the arms that carried her luggage
when they took to the motels in August,

the legs that hardened standing in line
for pills, bail bonds, loans. As she bends
to tear a rose from the brush, he feels
his tattoos burn again, mouths the words

he tried that morning when she stood at the window
and dreamed out loud about a silent world
without alarms or sirens, the men deserted
from the bars she worked in every other city,

her car disappearing in a white garage
on a street of houses blending together,
a picket fence and a lawn. She ascends
the valley again, slides her own door open,

wraps the coat back around her shoulders.
They drive and the clouds sink lower. That night,
as she lies face down on motel pillows,
he pictures her walking alone again

through the desert, the only figure left moving
in a shattered landscape of brush and bone
as if God had set creation backward,
let the footsteps perish one at a time

and left her to explore, her arms
relaxed at last in the arid evening,
her skirt gliding around unfinished roots
and coyotes fallen in ravines. Like a child,

she slides off her shoes, extends a finger
to brush the inescapable veins
of a perfect leaf, the infinite patterns
of snakeskin impaled on a jagged stone,

then dances, weightless, across the canyon,
her fists high, spinning in orange glow
as the world lies back and waits to pass under
when the last pair of eyes is closed.


    Published in College Town (Tebot Bach, 2010)