Rock Art Near Barker Dam, 2017
Photograph Courtesy of Joshua Tree National Park
A rooster crowing at 3 PM and rabbits and ridiculous quail
pecking around the yard with their floppy head-feathers means
I’m in the Elsewhere, and there was a tiny
tornado just now, at least that’s what it felt like—
two plastic chairs not merely blown sideways but lifted
right up and dropped down in different corners
of the yard and me here cowering and shielding
the laptop with my sandy self—and how do you react
to ancient petroglyphs that are technicolor-bright
due to a crew from Disney in the ‘60’s who decided to
brighten up the place for a shoot? 2000 years really does take
the shine off a person, said the woman outlined high
on the rockface this morning,
or it might have been
just me feeling overheated, under-resourced, is that term?
When you can’t finish a sentence because every small thing
is a crisis and you thought it would be different by now but she’s
just five, your youngest, and can’t reach much yet? The woman
on the rockface looks like something
a five-year-old might do, she’s that vivid,
with a triangle dress and no face but you can see, immediately,
that she’s gazing out over every cactus, every Joshua tree
in her domain, and I don’t want to claim that she was really
talking to me, but I’m also not ready to say she wasn’t.
It wasn’t, maybe, a windstorm, and a voice didn’t necessarily
speak out of the wind, but it might have said to me, like something
from the movies, you’re here,
on the last not-blown-away chair,
but you’re also going inside the deepest, coolest cave
of your own self. It might have said to me—she might have nodded
her stone head in agreement—
Go in, and bring back the news.