The sun paints this desert 

With harsh strokes of grass 

Red dabs of earth & brittle clay 

A naked abstract...bare 

That favors no one and all 

Where decay sits next to renewal 

And the wind, once just a haunting 

Is a ghost no more 

For it scrapes and stirs 

The crumpled landscape 

 
Here...I am but an etching 

Vulnerable and fragile 

A paradox of movement 

Comprised of a simple sanguine liquid 

Within a thin atmosphere of skin 

Asking only for a cold-water spring 

To replenish my spirit 

I cup my hands, for even the sun 

Cannot quell its coolness 

But it is...I am, merely transient 

 
The ground beneath me baked  

Into a dirt like powder 

Ash, leaf, and seed 

Who scamper and dance 

In the cooked swirl 

Settling between toes 

Of the ancestors... 

Those rocks who knew 

The sun as adolescent 

A child first learning  

The ways of gravity 

 
Here, I become nothing 

Pulled into myself 

A ball, a world, a satellite  

Separated from my importance 

Falling, through a continuum  

Wishing to be unbound 

Yet, there is one strong stream 

Who is my tether 

That still holds onto a trickle 

Adorned with balsam, lupine, and fiddleneck 

Yanking me back to the depth 

Of human sight, to perception 

Where the first Romantics wrote, and 

To where my eyes meet yours