Epic Road Trip #2

The history of the Earth
is in these red rock cliffs,
the faces, beasts and eyes
dance across the skies with robes and veils
the wars and transformations:
the crowns, stripes and epaulets,
the sacred hieroglyphs exposed,
the fortresses torn into wounds
still wrinkled towers;
the dramas and discoveries:
the pedestals and jowls,
the crevasses of torqued tongues,
the stacked beaks fit to patterns,
the rock weights balanced, about to take wing.
There are secrets, in the drippings,
of the civilizations before humans
but my heart cannot conceive them,
she sees it all as pain -
she can't imagine anything
beyond her own convolutions
in the stone's peaceful tableau.

Red canyons, red rivers, red tablelands
and now the sky
is a sirocco of smoke,
a red wall of silt brought by gale force winds
obscuring all and dissolving like flash powder,
turning the stone forms into phantoms,
leaving a fiery wake of red road and red dune shoulders.

The raindrops, when they come, seem like blood.