The hard mountains rise helter-skelter

suddenly out of the skillet flatness.

It’s provided a place for mariposa, desierto, alamosa,

words I never leave home without.

Places that’ve amassed in my

heart through the years spirit over me

keep me in their hard beauty,

nourish my cynic’s wonder. At

La Cieneguilla, the old pueblo has

vanished into the bosque along with its

scorpions and enduring wisdoms,

a woman is grinding corn

in the sunlit doorway.

The Rio Grande reverts back to the sky it once was.

This presence of absence prevails

I’ve watched it draw some of us into the ground

with it, this now quieted place is insatiable, like ruins.

What else is borne on the dust but dystopian spring

swarming over the heart of Navajo Nation?

Ghost towns rise among the living.

There’s no time to wax ambivalent:

the lights in our spirits don’t just shine

they deflagrate and I’m at the bottom of some stark,

sane untamed canyon where quarantine looks

like the desert, where the mariposa lilies bloom

and can sometimes coax juniper

bluebirds of words from the sky.