Dry Heat                                                                                            

During Q & A I answered
No, don’t follow your passion!

After the uproar, someone said
Your wild red hair sparks fear in some,
arousal in others.

Everyone let their hair down that year.
Or tied it back.

Some thought I was Jesus.

The day Sugar Girl cried out
I ran, unleashing
my tangle electric in the bakery.

She let me kiss her sweet crumb lips,
blonde ringlets running there to there.

July in the desert,
a young saguaro in search of herself
goes missing for days.

We asked javelina.
We talked to bush muhly,
the red spotted toad.

Dry heat.                                                                                        

Hold your breath, you can bake
a chicken in each lung.

I called her name.
No answer.

I sang, deep as taproot.

Silence.

Until a breeze picked up
and we heard the wind’s soft whistle
through her spines.

Arizona Garden                                                                                                                                      

The sun dried your hardwood tendons,
your head came loose.

Pick-axe, one swing and this caliche will break us.

Time to shim you up, tell the wheel
grind off your burrs.

To prep this yard, we’ll have to crack its calcic hull,
claw, rip and pull up
each barbed tangle of bermuda grass.

I know why they call her Devil weed.

She hid her immigrant seeds in hay bedding,
crossed an ocean with roots that burrow six feet deep,
runners taking hold on the surface.

Leave just one, its shoot will sprout and take over.

Midday sun takes blue sky, stretches it
gauze white.

I never worked like this as a boy.

All I ever hit were books, no thoughts of a flying axe
splitting my skull, revealing
a handful of pea gravel, dead flowers, a few drops of shade
borrowed from a mesquite tree.

You can dance on hard ground for years and never see
the sun light up a garden.

Time to find a line, tap it, watch the hoses tense,
spit, let go.

Water fills the runnels, the ground wakes up—dry
becomes wet, hard becomes soft,             
                                                    day with its evening.

Caliche,                                                                                                                                                                                                           

hard earth of the desert.

To cut your grave out of this, I used my axe, its handle
bleached from years of sun, its loose head
shimmed—

The head can fly off, crease a piñata, out falls
dry desert heat.

Plants dig into the calcic cement.
Their leaves drop.

Desperate, the hungry gnaw bones, eat themselves
from inside out—you were one,

and when you called my name—the snap of a mesquite branch—
the heat carried me,

back to the arroyo where I walked in circles, reading James Wright
while you listened, coiled like a snake on warm sand.

Spider, with time in her silk, kept spinning it out.

Prickly pear, cholla, they knew what you wanted.

High astral glow, your life traded in               
for a cloud of ether.

In the shadows of ants, in the still voice of an ironwood tree,
not a trace.

I talked to lizard.
I asked coyote, but he grabbed his shadow and ran.

In the long shade of saguaros, I sang your name,
deep as taproot, until I was my own first drop of a hidden spring.

Feeling my way along the arroyo.