Desert Mirage

Red, all red and black on the heights, and the rest bleaching to chalk. Rock, rock in every form: jagged and smooth, gleaming like a saddle polished through many campaigns or dull as a cyst.
Scrub. Desert. Rock, again rock ignited by the blinding sun.

And here I am now, the precipitate of complex desires, these bloody genetic spirals: I lie under this cupola, dried to a yellow husk by the heat of the south. My vista is empty, except for a rock and at last a crow. And then a thunder – blue cloud, chanting to itself, although it will sail elsewhere to deliver its burden of rain.

Not even the mind can be tethered here. I drift into dreams. The cupola folds itself around me like a marble placenta. The sun speckles the brown of remembered eyes with gold. All is chill and marmoreal to the touch. I drift further. A chalk – white face and the slanting fall of a steel crescent. Then a band of saw -  tooth mercenaries hacking their way through the gaps in the hills, plunging into valleys where the blacksmiths have forgotten the gentle arts of the cutlass and the bridle. I drift northwards to meet my ancestors as they come down again, over the east slopes.

The sky is the thinnest of tissues today. If I could, I would wet it with what tears I have, and watch it crumple and tear along its creases in my hands.