If Only To Wake When Night
Drive through the Mojave heading west
and you inherit the desert’s hot breath
the parched sandpit of it—
When I was looking for relevance
I held hands with a world that needed me
badly as it needs fire trails
through lowland scrub,
root systems and laughter.
I was in a new kind of desert
where the Santa Anas lick down
your shoulders halfway through a latte,
but the Mojave’s not duped
by orange blossoms, avocado trees,
clutches of Bermuda grass
when all irrigation gives rise
to twenty million fine, identical blades.
A city-desert is a nightmare world,
a Sahara sprawled in every direction
with stucco, brick, Spanish tile, sheet metal, glass,
teak and tile playhouses in the hills
where ficus and doum palms
disguise the dunes,
where desert cars are hallucinations
across flats of broiled land
where women wear gauzy numbers to stress
their melon breasts and men hide
their bald heads in Dodgers caps.
When night breaks the sky is a starless
fixed bluescreen
on the abandoned Dreamworks wagon,
but the city never sleeps,
instead it burns
with helicopter searchlight fingers
tattooing ten thousand lamps
of sand along my arms
only to wake when night’s
a saguaro flower cloistered
in stout spines along the dry plains—
if the desert were a woman
she’d want to whistle a tune to herself
(you know what they say about a whistling woman)
lodged as she is in pancake rock layers,
the millennial batter
of conch shells beaten
then cooked
always wanting
always the mason of jettisoned architecture.
She would sing
through taproot fingers
but the city wouldn’t hear her.
| Alexis Orgera |
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