Like Taos, you believed semi-arid
To be the normal state of love
For that was where yours was born,
During one of its infrequent downpours
…Oh, you poor soul, thinking the desert
Was always in bloom with blinding color.
When dry returned you raced
From scraggy pine to big sagebrush
Proclaiming it the Garden of Eden,
To you shifting dunes was her landscape.
Even Your crazy brother could see her love
Was more like the Garden of Halfway
                                        You’d come to this place
From the sage monks of Salt Lake
Like a preadolescent ape with nothing
To do except swing from rosary beads.
You met her in the succulent show  
At the National Guard Armory 
Recent rain made the fleshy parts work.
In 7,300 days there were two procreations
& an occasional spooning.  The morning
Of the five alarm, the firetruck blazing
By the empty bed on the sidewalk,
You could smell smoke.  Flames arose.
You cracked like an egg with its yolk out
and the septuagenarian madre arrived
To put the knives away and to show you
Where the spoons were.  Crazy brother 
Rode out from Santa Fe with his train set
To demonstrate how in the high-desert
It takes a long while to slow up 
When your’re going downhill
                                        Your metamorphosis
Became the five-year pupa plan:
No flying trapeze
No red mustang
No roaming holiday
No breech of service
Only grim grind, school play, winking nod
& a white house in the strands of split level,
Not much Plush
But you did plenty good with the Flush.
Time past with the slow ticking of flat land
Until once again the crazy brother,
Who drug you along to Albuquerque
For games of holy volleyball.
He found the rest of his life
All you got was thrown off
A filly from San Angelo