Barrens

Ghostwind

Slathering light, in slabs,

scatters reflecting heat.

Only root and stone don’t budge.

You walk—the broom-grit

burrowing in your eyelids, your mouth—

over these sunburned dunes,

fading silhouettes. Sister, you have no companion.

Like this valley road, words

lead to... never something new,

your unique story of pain.

You don’t believe it can be shared.

From this full-moon road,

the overlook, mountain lions and coyote

arise, sniffing for survivors

along the desert’s stone spheres and spires.

Sand whips over canyons,

rolls to reverberations: wind-noise

at desert borders. Here is no void

or you’d vanish. Here you stand,

circled endlessly. This ghostwind

keeps all crouching spaces alive,

transfigures you to nobody.

Your scars offer up their stories. What’s leftover,

coyotes will pick clean. Only

the surrounding hills’ sediment survives

to translate previous ages—

witness to an invaded body

trundling over and over

itself, always absent. Someone lost

here, one myth goes, never

comes out the same again. Stone echoes

a coyote’s cries.

.

Your new home is the ghost town below.

The car frame hitched on stone blocks

by the run down house, the clothesline

left to flap in wind and collapse.

Where rusting metal, spines of machines

heave through lacquered times.

The clocks stopped ticking long ago:

desert again.

The Red Desert

Silos sever the view with frames of barrels

and brewing steam. Your mother grips your hand,

walking the wet road beneath rasping smoke stacks,

fires pulsing in rhythm. She hasn’t driven

since the accident. Her hand sweats over

yours. Something infects you doctors can’t name.

At lunch, workers huddle by black bags.

You’re frenzied with starving. She petitions

a man’s panino, sold at the crossroads, half-

eaten. The desert feeds on you no matter what you eat.

Feeling derelict, she pulls you across mounds

of smoking ash. Always rattled. She knows

accidents, quicksands await these unknown

footprints. Defiled. Once your father hid inside

this fog, oversaw these buildings. Yellow smoke gusts

over grates and window grills.

That terrible something. Tonight

there will be no hearth fire, only a blanket rumpled

over her body. No moment of cover at your house

rumbling a mile away. The desert pinned you

snug with panic. It fatigues the scaffolds.

More real than the metal tanks, smoke

hisses along. You make no sound as she runs to you,

the fishless sea, seepage sucking

at your feet, streaming ash overhead. You sink

beside the road. Wind buries it.

No one looms on rusting

red land where nothing comes back.

Disowned

The chasm covered over. You disappeared where

no one follows. On unmarked roads,

their detours, shrubs fill out silt dust,

the mesa’s old volcanic action. Something

unseen still creeps across: the distance—

nothing visible moves—the hidden colors at your feet:

a red cactus blossoms for seconds after rain washes

rootholds away. You promised nothing would touch

you again. A coyote skull bleaches to stone.

You crouch in its stare, choking, drunk

on wine beside the disappearing, re-appearing

house, mounds of trash. This place you can’t read.

Claret cups and cholla sprout only to be plucked

out. Sand whips the rocks, wind through

bag pipes and zithers. The same full blue moon.

He is just a dead body—a Hades for disappearing,

a face of Apollo that re-appears. Here, you belong

to him. Your mother searches through

a human winter, hoping you’ll become Persephone

on land whose animals abandoned one another. You too

have no desire to eat. To be less than this emptiness,

a half-starved coyote. You begin to bleed,

walking west on roads where every car breaks down.

A human shape blurs over red sand—

Desert Time

Horizons: red-glass slag and copper mountains.

Hills, rounded under your feet, cinnamon-brown, warm

as your father’s skin. This sky, turquoise and thick gold,

stretches textures of clean wool. Night, made from

mountain roots, flows into canyons and springs

with deep frosts. The camphor-smell, creosote, lingers

with the frail trees and bush-sized puffs of grey dust

in the runnels of eroding hills. Steam seeps through dead land—

scraped by ice—barely a foothold. Its coyotes

always escape, licking clean their scabs. You stir only to survive.

In winter, mistletoe blooms—clouds of green, hot

buzzing and cool song, yellow bees

and ebony bird, red berries. Temperature-drops peel

the rocks. Unless you become their dust, smelling

of dark rye, you won’t re-appear. Come up

from this ground, calloused like skin.

The winter sun devastates a by-gone world. Fingers

dig fresh sand. All these bits—the grains—are new. For you.

Driving By Night

Speeding the highway—yellow apparitions—

to your hometown far ahead, you’re humming along

with the engine. From time to time: the stares

of oncoming headlights. Cold night seeps through

your clunker’s holes, the distance between you

and the approaching diner. Dunes collapsed by loops

of rock on the basin floor. A red sun pokes above

roofs straddling this main street. When driving nights,

it’s good to be lost in a breakfast rush. Throughout

this trip, you’ve stomached those unseen coyotes,

afraid to stop. But here, the waitress calls you honey.

On the menu, you point to steak and eggs.

Booths fill with elderly couples not spilling a word.

Fluid again, you’re rummaged by exhaustion:

a wall bearing you up. To a child, the thought

of Coca-Cola tastes just like this. These old

snowbirds, coffee in hand, will head west to nowhere.

You’ll hole up in a last stand hotel above granite

and gneiss. Halfway to where you hate returning. For now,

rest. You’re here. Sand rinses from your hair. Cool

water drops on soft linen. You stare at the welcome

glow of a TV. The mattress bracing your back.

Spreading your toes, fingers in the pocket of sheets

airy on your skin, all around—the smell of pine—

John C. Van Dyke’s Desert

In 1901, he envisions another desert: the best

desert book ever written. They say

he wears a Hamburg. Cloaked with high-cut collar,

waist coat and false-cuffs, he walks

the old hacienda’s edge. In La Noria Verde,

a secret traveler, he signs The Desert,

and dedicates it to Andrew Carnegie.

They say he is a bagman who hides

corrupt bosses in Mexico, a wealthy man nursing

ill health with desert air. He may have fathered

an illegitimate child, escaped here. His ruse of a rugged

outdoorsman becomes a self-fulfilling

prophecy. He makes up names for desert plants,

blaming his ignorance on poorly-written

guidebooks. The charlatan

produces a desert that will never be settled.

Van Dyke even stumbles

on a chunk of gold and can’t steal it

from its stunning vista. Come you New York art lovers.

From God’s oversight to a dawn land,

a phantasm of gold—every sandscape blossoms

with metaphors. Where figs and pomegranates

grow from Sinbad tales, sand builds rhythms of drifts

under air-blue contours every sunrise.

Look past these train tracks, past

steel mills and coal-dusted row houses,

all that chooses immunity to this magic land.

It welcomes artists

to mad places. Here, you’re still brave and restless:

lost natures await rediscovery. All you sick

and weary, the desert doesn’t grasp or reject a thing.

It transforms your past.

Relax, breathe. Bring outdoor vigor and stare

like a Rembrandt scholar across

tawny gold light. Come to the writhing Sonora

refurbished with this vocabulary.

Stillness

Nothing is what you thought it was: the ranch house

you grew up in, beside rises of sage. It’s still here.

You kick down poster board in the back window, crawl

in. Your flashlight blazes four iron bed frames.

Coil springs jut above flat springs. You

touch the decay that’s touching you. Broken off the vanity—

a full-length mirror propped against the back wall. Once you hid

inside this house from the world outside. Your reflected

face no longer the dutiful daughter’s—who dusted

looming bookshelves, your father’s picture,

the hutch and grandfather clock. It’s the woman’s,

holding the flashlight. Only a ghost would enter the uneven

hallway, touch the crumbling wall. Sitting

on the camel-back couch, you open the dusty box of books, curled

Zane Grey covers, fishing almanacs: yellow, bendable.

All the antiques are breaking down. Splintered

wood sprouts through varnish. In the yellow kitchen:

tomatoes and corn are sealed in Ball jars for winter,

whiskey jugs, crocks for corned beef, clay bowls

and rusty tins stacked in the pantry. You

let them crumble. In the living room, the crystal radio

and ash tray still stand beside father’s chair. You

leave them. The front door opens onto the cracked

porch, open air. Through ripped screens,

you stare across this treeless place beneath the mountain

stream, where trout hide at night, settle down in stillness.

A Plateau

The basin breaks into grassland,

green rifts between

mountain rocks—arching apart.

Your face turns to

gravel roads, train tracks, pinyon

and pine. Mining country trails down

the abandoned homes and streets. Coyote pass

over. Washed-out, ragged

fields expose coyote bones running

through the range’s softer body.

Moisture, drawn-out, heaves upward:

old swamp beds, fossil shells,

Indian beads, delta sands.

Rock chips to holes and edges.

Sand rusts in kiln breath to the color

of salmon meat. The wind,

ancient brine stings your eyes. This immense

evaporation you walk through

to the overlook. Sister speak

this desert, reveal

the unfathomable, like these

places I ghostwrite for you.

On the slopes, cottonwoods are flowering.

Here, you can love your father

with your own life, see something you haven’t seen—

an appetite for whatever’s there.

This desert, like Van Dyke’s,

changes overnight. I wait

to touch your hand. Desert extinctions stay

as common as this moment—hyenas,

vultures hover patiently. Seashells

dotting the mountain tops.

I see you standing on the overlook,

a scraped-out valley. You grip

your keys, choosing to return. The road keeps

opening onto the horizon,

no-man’s land. Desert ledges

fade with the eroding

plateau to a quarter moon, the exploding sun

that strikes the desert, again.

**Barrens incorporates variations on details from Diana Kappel-Smith’s book Desert Time and David W. Teague and Peter Wild’s Introduction to The Secret Life of John C. Van Dyke.**