Desert
By Dennis SalehA few times each morning
the sand and plants and distant edge
lift themselves to the daily wind,
as though a train passed,
or a vessel, in a last farewell.
You can see everything agree
it is nothing, and settle back into itself
from the tips of scrub branches
down through the stems into soil,
agree it is nothing. Another day.
There is a flat stretch of sameness
between things, the fade of color
at noon, the distances leading
equally to nothing, the dying,
and the different bands of heat.
Only the slits in things look out
into it, chapped surfaces of rock,
thin folds in leather lizard skin,
thin, shadowed lines in wood
where the grain is gone, split open.
Eyes gone, or covered all day
at the stark pulse of sky,
heat searing the ground blues,
the sand reds, and the faint
greens bunched in places.
The traces of color pass down
through the soil into the deep mix
of shadows below, where they rest
like sun at the end of day.
The sky is white, and then red,
remembering, like a burn.
Insects curl right in shell skeletons,
buds of sand join into new rocks
little toy deaths tick down.
More desert comes from the few
things that happen, agreed most
things should end, it all comes back,
the same stretches and pause
of heat, the moments of breath,
and shadow, and sand.
