After D.E. Green’s “Pink Cadillac”  

The sun pours down but nothing moves,
desert’s colors a pallette of pinks, best
seen just after a rare rain.  My love affair
with rock and sand and sky began in writing,
when I knew my soul needed bleaching—I turned  
to book and page and slow walks on rock-lined paths.  

Rain in the desert, when it comes, rips and runs back
quickly into sand, now dark.  Who knows what it leads to,
that water we’re blind to, once it vanishes into the pink,
those old covered layers of life and death, elemental spells
of time, erasing the everyday—the kind of world
our words might live in, if our want is strong,
if deep breathing can outpace our worries, if we can put
them under the table, tuck them into dark moist sand.  

At night the desert flowers bloom, desire gone mad,
songbirds quietening as rocks romance sky.
Where is the book of life I want to write and live?
Why can’t I cram my words onto the page
like rocks in my pockets, my lust for writing
outlasting the reds and pinks that race around me now?