Today, I dust off old prayers, sweep clean the sky and drive
through a crumbling earth, swallow rivers until the stones ache
the way melaleuca soaks up the swamp, beetles steal a host’s skin

Where time becomes mastodon limbs blanching in the limitless wind,
wind that sounds like an ocean, reciting secrets told to my shadow
in confidence, an ocean of secrets, the depths still uncharted

They say this desert once held an ocean under its breast,
strata secreted with ancient dolphin skulls, mollusk shells,
ocean beds curling around ceilings, caverns like frozen waves

This is how the earth rewrites itself, unbinding the molecules
that teach it what it used to be, exchanging for dry lightning
what once was promised you in every color of the spectrum

What once could have been coconut flowers, now husks of flame,
blue yucca, palo verde, acacia scatter the sun-torched valleys,
rose mesas sketch a horizon sinking its teeth into the heavens

This is how the sky rebirths herself; rivers carving canyons
waiting for the rains to reshape rock into a language ravens
can understand, unmooring ghosts from the boundless clouds

Previously published online in Sky Island Journal