The Desert

We emerged finally
From the womb of the earth
Shaking
Shining
Standing naked and newborn
Upon the back of the huge carcass
Ancient beyond time
Bleached and dry
And all around the bones of its inhabitants
Splayed across the sand

Sweet smoke on the desert
Blurring the stars
And burning our eyes
As the last echoes of our prayers
Wailed in our ears
And the canyon gazed empty
Before the mountains of red rock,
Rock like the hard inward essence
Thrust up by the changeling Earth in all
Its young glory;
Remembrance of that cosmic exaltation
Long since brought to heavenly ruin

And here we stood reborn upon the aftermath,
Our fleeting feet upon the endless sands
Like the breath of an insect stirs the cosmos
We mortal journeymen are unnoticed by time
On the great, cracked face of this desert clock
Which remains heedless of regal orbitals
And sinks continuously into its own past
And so its future as well
Never caring whether the skeleton which decays upon it was once
Coyote
Man
Cactus
Or immovable stone
And only for the churning of the circular energy of life
And death
And the place on which
For the smallest of moments
We stood.