Up Shaw Butte Again

Ooh, always living inside everyone.
The rock path lifts me away,
To where the paloverde is in flames.
The desert is smelt but not seen,
Felt but not heard.
There’s no suffocating grandeur
Of but one shade tree.

The endless fields of rectangles below,
That house the spirits, from here seem
Mere forms, offering no key
To the way I disappear
Around others…

Crowns of thorns and garlands of solitude,
For it’s too hot up here for mere people,
Hot enough for lizards.
Yet I don’t disappear in this,
I feel each feature of the mountain as my own,
More sensitive to it than to my own skin:
The ever-moving hill that doesn’t need to ever move,
The sajuaros that are tall enough for birds.
The plateau wide enough for each ocotillo
To reach its Shiva arms to nothingness
With everything inside of it.

I reach in, it reaches out
At any point with the best reward,
To know myself,
To see and yet be seen.