Monsoon Desert

1.

We are what we feel and every day we fear the sun. The sun is all over us. Then every afternoon the sky stitches itself gray, squeezes out rain. The wet articulates us, soaks acres. Bow to your geography. Turn toward yourself. Be persuaded to check out for long periods, to transform a trip into postcards, nostalgia in shoeboxes. We live with death. A claw is fallen on the landscape. The hole in the storm is for my eyes to go through.


2.

The present is all we know of the known. We drive at right angles to the mountains, incinerating the dust road. Speed obliterates what we pass. When someone stops something inside you that is not love. The pin-prick comes from elsewhere. A lightning-scorched tree—sculpted silvery torso, one thin limb curled inward. The wind blows through the empty shells of houses. The areolae of the clouds darkens and gives. The desert waxes, waxes.