The land never wanted us.You know this
in March when the wind raises the dust level
to choke or becomes the thin blue needle
that penetrates the inner ear until every last
word scrapes against you like hot car or hot gun.
And one day you spy a bird in a nearby sycamore,
stripped of its feathers as if by oiled fingers.
The developments always had ghosts just as the
sky itself is made of them.  The light that leaves
the body when the body is gone.  I ask you why we
moved here.  You shrug, but the answer is
not as simple as despair.  More like the hunger
we feel as we split the last fig from our back-
yard tree—that such honey should exist in this
landscape of arroyo and chicken wire, the thousand
plastic bags swelling with wind like cartoon 
hearts in love.  Perhaps we only grew addicted
to the ability (that seemed ours) to see as if from
very far away. To see as we imagine God might
if he existed, wandering his mansion of many rooms,
unable to discern from so on high if we are embracing 
or strangling each other. Now the abandoned homes
have formed a city, a ghost of our own; it speaks of
betrayal and abandonment; it speaks the language
of any desert thing, which must shed a skin, a 
sting in order to survive, hard thorn of ocotillo
which resembles at some distance a flower, a
spike in this dust-packed earth, this house of sky.

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