Desert Vignettes

Cool mountain air blows with the dust.
The crows glide in parallel glissandos.

In the quiet of the wash,
Old wood, not dead, with spikes for leaves
Keeps winding its story
Of gray through sunlit ages.

The mimosa unrepentantly green,
With its tiny fern-like leaves,
Shelters wood and rattlesnakes,
Sticks shaped like scorpions and scorpions shaped like sticks.

Nothing growing in the riverbed but feathers
But trees open holes in rock cliff-sides.

A purple blanket left by nature’s forces
As if for a ghost Indian
Who used to wind these gulches
Following water along foot-deep stony beds.

Crickets like bullets in the wind.

A bough of shade and a dream of water
To the sound of the hot wind's torrent.
Dry trees creak and crackle
Like drops of rain on sizzling rocks.
What feels like an ocean breeze
Flows through the valley of bottled fire
Then everything suddenly still,
Cold wafting up from the ground,
A lizard pauses with head held high.

The silence of no creatures,
Then, up ahead,
Translucent as the sun,
A jackrabbit as large as a dog.