Sonoran Desert Poem

       “the ones who live in the desert,
        if you knew them
        you would understand everything.”

         –lucille clifton

I

coming to the desert for the first time

and the night turns over a millennia before you
just say the name mountain

of mountains—make more
out of bird formations or drainage pipes

deserts build water
so drink the lightning

II

so you have been here for some time

velvet ants and paper wasps testify
sandstone bones are left long under sage

bones sculpted by sand—sand that collects its legs
in the atmospheric heat to storm and swallow

an entire city—a city that too builds its water
from fly ash—drink from that now

the cactus wren finished the lightning

III

there are those who come to the desert
because they have always been here

wind coyotes grow thorns
in the inches of light sunsets have

of mountains—do not make a mountain
reach for one and let it turn away from you

Buffalograss

Barely-morning pink curtains
drape an open window. Roaches scatter,

the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods.
His hair horsetail and snakeweed.

I siphon doubt from his throat
for the buffalograss.

Seep willow antler press against
the memory of the first man I saw naked.

His tongue a mosquito whispering
its name a hymn on mesquite,

my cheek. The things we see the other do
collapse words into yucca bone.

The Navajo word for eye
hardens into the word for war.

Anthropocene: A Dictionary

definitions provided by the Navajo–English Dictionary by Leon Wall & William Morgan

dibé bighan: sheep corral 

juniper beams caught charcoal in the late summer morning
night still pooled in hoof prints; deer panicked run from water 

ooljéé’ biná’adinídíín: moonlight

perched above the town drowned in orange and streetlamp
the road back home dips with the earth
                                                                    shines black in the sirens 

bit’a’ :  its sails or—its wing (s)

           driving through the mountain pass
                       dólii, mountain bluebird, swings out—
           from swollen branches
I never see those anymore, someone says 

diyóół        : wind (

                         wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
                         plastic bags driftwood the fence line 

nihootsoii 

            :             evening—somewhere northward fire 
                                       twists around the shrublands; 
                               sky dipped in smoke—twilight 

        —there is a word for this, 
                                                    someone says 

                                        :           deidííłid, they burned it  
    
                                        :           kódeiilyaa, we did this

Eating Wild Carrots with My Brothers on the Mesa

cicada wane
water and sun race every infinite evening
fall exists for the dock root to oxalate
each roof of every mouth
            each winter with its obsessed wind
                        each spring that sees storm after storm
                                                    each wild that wilds

pasqueflowers open their palms to straight rain