Chris Goldberg, El Cosmico - Marfa, Texas (Artist Flickr, Website)
Digital photograph
Courtesy of Flickr
The desire paths between houses
staggered and faded where memory
trips. At the base of a mountain,
my grandmother’s pink trailer, the desert wash
beside it only a river in monsoon,
a long strip of dead oak collects
what drifts down. When his knife shed
away lichen and gray from the branch
to show green, Dickon told Mary,
It’s as wick as you
or me, the debt of tenderness
owed. Loss the skin and living
the flesh. The porch light
was on even in daylight, clouds
of moth wings stuck and swaying.
The harsh heat my grandmother planted
and persisted in. The mountain’s shadow
a different earth between
seasons. The long drives we took,
she and I, watching the ranches plume
in tumbleweeds, wind bursting
in migration. Yellow mallows dreamt
between aloe. Saguaro
hollowed, felted at its roots
with quails. Streams from our hands, sugar
for hummingbirds, what it meant to
still get up in the morning—I held
onto the intervals of silence that fell
from both our mothers. Even with hers
long gone, nearly just a story, my grandmother
seems to wait. We scatter the birdseed,
she tells me what to tend, what to keep.