A primal sun fires this desert
land of spicy sage and renegade rocks
that move mysteriously in the night.
Morning finds them sitting like toads in the road,
the true guardians of this world,
voices silent and hard as silver.

Far off, lightening lunges toward earth in a bolt of silver.
But the storm doesn't reach the high desert.
It is caught on the peaks of a mountainous world
and scorns this dry land with its river of rocks
and abandoned homes on desolate roads
that like the boulders move in the night.

Sometimes I walk in the hills at night
under a black sky streaked with silver.
I leave behind the empty road
for the pocked earth of the desert
to climb to the top of the tallest rock
and for a while feel alone in the world.

I am as rooted as the juniper trees to this world.
Once in the shade of night,
I hid in a crevice to try and catch the movement of rocks.
But I never saw them, only the silver
wings of a screech owl hunting the desert
and flickering lights on a distant road.

In the end it was the tolerance of the road
that kept me from despair in this world.
I had grown as dry as a desert
and as restless as a wind-torn night.
And I believed then that love was a silver
treasure that would hold me steady as rocks.

There must be a magician's society among the rocks
because every day there are more in the road,
in their own way rapid as quicksilver,
perhaps urged on by the very world
they watch over and travel through at night
leaving behind grooved paths through the desert.

Like the rocks, I seek refuge in the desert
where the sun bleaches the world silver
and I speak the language of night and the road.

copyright © the author, 2000