mesquite and creosote,
prickly pear and yucca,
trees like fairy tale dwarfs
not just small but twisted,
weird, and unforgiving,
ascetic zeal sprouting needles
trying hard to ask the world
for nothing at all.
Of a sudden purling water
makes insistent music
heading downhill fast.
Snowed peaks peer down at high desert
as the very funky Los Americanos bus
trundles on
from El Paso toward Albuquerque.
Unsettled, wrapped about some void,
I catch a few words as six small screens
seek to ease our passage
by playing
a Mexican melodrama,
but the image will not hold;
it flips & flips & flips.
In San Felipe de Neri
we buy a prayer medal
of St. Dymphna
who prays in a cloud
surrounded by lunatics.
She has yet to intercede
in the case of the swarthy man
outside in the plaza
who sits in the dust and tosses
with nervous excitement
a belt to the ground
again and again.
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