Desert Images: Not Photos

Over desert road that ribbon they talk about
sometimes black sometimes
the same color as the bleached rust cliffs
that lift right up to the edge and stop
top flat or shove straight down slightly sloped
to a base of rock rubble sand to chaparral
and yellow grasses
across this and more of this
hearing occasionally from the place in my head
where the speech center resonates,
old Firesign Theatre dialogue:
"That's a beaut!"
"No, it's a mound."
"An’ right purdy, too!"

But more than the playbacks my mind volunteers with such frequency -
the mind begins to quiet.

Thoughts muse subtly about geology
but find no need to analyze why
thrust faults and gapes and gaws in the land
or how the mountains kept such clean horizontal tops
or wonder beyond a ponder why what grows where it grows
grows where it does.

And why that black flitting bird flies here: does it know about pigeons?

Houses in the middle of nowhere are home.

Navajo land with no imposed trees, no hardscape, no green lawns.

Australian Cattle Dog is he lost no his job is to chase our car away.

Grasslands and little short trees shaped like buffalo: camouflage for the missing.

Three horses grazing by the side of the road slow down there is no fence.

Long wooled sheep makes eye contact with me as we go by, he chews, once I think, with that lateral moving jaw.

Sunset colors the whole sky pink longer lingering orange turquoise spreading yellow west east takes periwinkle to grey and twilight - -

Venus introduces the starry - -

At what point did I quietly accept only seeing six or twelve stars in the city-night skies?

I need to learn this deepening sky, observe quiet darkness’ depths.

I bet I find the Milky Way again.