Breathe


 Morning comes softly to Alamogordo.

The Sacramento Mountains emerge from sleep
one shadow at a time,
their ridges gathering light
like old memories returning to the body.

A thrasher splashes in the bird bath.

Water lifts.
Water falls.

The sound is small enough
to be mistaken for a prayer.

The desert says nothing.

Creosote.
Dust.
Stone.

The long language of things
that survive.

I stand among ghosts I once called myself.

The child who dreamed of elsewhere.
The man who carried too much.
The lives that fit for a season
and then loosened,
slipping away like old skin.

The earth keeps them all.

Every day I walk in a quiet funeral.

No black clothes.
No hymns.

Only sunlight moving across gravel.
Only wind lifting the corners of memory.
Only the endless procession
of what has ended
making room for what has not yet begun.

The mountains brighten.

The thrasher climbs from the water
and vanishes into the mesquite.

Nothing announces itself.

Still,
something is happening.

The wind moves through the yard
and through my chest
with the same patient hand.

This morning,
the earth feels like a rib cage.

Wide.
Ancient.
Protective.

Bones curved around a heart
I cannot see.

Beneath the soil,
my ancestors rest.

Beneath them,
older oceans.

Beneath those,
fire.

And somewhere inside all of it,
beneath every ending,
something continues to beat.

The mountains keep waking.

The wind keeps moving.

The dead keep becoming earth.

And I stand here
in the hollow between yesterday and tomorrow,

listening

to the great body of the desert breathe.

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