LATE SEPTEMBER – PASSING THE HOOVER DAM AT DUSK

I entered by somber incandescence
of lamps in the late twilight, your pulse of
concrete and cables. Along your narrow,
winding road stood visitors dispersed in their shadows of a deep unspeaking while
in nightfall's serrated horizon the
dark hills gathered into ghostly faces,
lost Chaldeans ever fixed upon stars.
Even the sky changed the way it touched you,
for in your peril from something thickly
hung in the air - like a plague ship at bay -
she watched over you as a fevered child.

TO THE UNFALLEN

Moistening silent
shores of departure,
blood, that other salt
weaving under dust,
spreads and undulates,
yet taints neither earth
nor will's fallow ground
as we hear whispers
telling murderers,
we are not Carthage.

A DISCERNABLE HORIZON

In delirious thirst, clouds drift unchained.
Dense with silence, the altitude between
the hawk's arc and the tracing in the sand
spells a last definition of freedom
where clouds drink themselves into winedark storms.

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