I.
The sad trees
Let fall their leaves.
The grey streets
Pull down the sky.
Irregular rebar
Rusts in the air
Above the pens of the human
Farms.
Kids flip for tips in the tar
Of the highway
Outside the papelaria and the slow walk
Of peddlers
With masks and cowboy hats
And ever-moving eyes
Like eagles a leap away from captivity.
One strings line on bended knee.
II.
The wrens converse at "Flat Earth Burgers,"
A rancherita
Beyond the crumbled outskirt bricks,
In the bee desert,
The other city, grand and glorious,
Above the tableland,
Where, in the dust beyond the masks,
What is can finally be spoken of
By saguaros all fingers,
Only touch,
Not able to grasp, yet their stark columns
Claim the mist,
Holding a certain code that keeps
Its stillness
As the lights of the city tell their secrets
Across the hills.
The horses stare, like they're guardians
Of the quiet,
As their bells sing the chaos of Sonora.
They look with love
At humans in their kindness, shocked by
The whitened bones
Picked clean by jaws and sun and laid down
Like an offering.
The snakes of low-lying limbs
Tumble towards the sun.
The tree with peeling skin glows
Magnificent in its umber.
The thorns weave delicate thoughts
Around the serpentine
Webbing of the desert that all life is
Caught within.
A butterfly escapes to the sky, where
Fire flowers
Rise from the sea of ashen branches
Like deer antlers
That make shapes like human dancers
But so slow
Even the wind
Barely moves them.
