It isn't like that.
It isn't a left turn too early,
a lark awake at night,
thick brown light in an open field;
unpredictable: a bad or counter-miracle.
It is only wanton.

You know how it is
Suddenly, something trapped between your toes:
the world has a strangled voice, it is
unroofed. You want the comfort of normal walls,
normal light, normal noise; in your hand
is a hot brand you'd halfway use
to smith it back together
and halfway swallow.
I had different plans for this vacation
than destruction.

I had plans. You had plans. The earth
planned its axial tilt; the weather planned
its burning; we put aside too little water.
A few plants were familiar -
the ruined piñon pine I remembered from the placard.
One lonesuch tree that made a little niche
at a defiant angle into the air
and outlived all except its orphaning.
How we thought we could fare better, I cannot say.

Ten feet up by one hundred feet over:
one liter water per mile climbed:
fatigue. Fatigue.
The quiet supremacy of all these rules for living like
transit and occultation
refraction and dimness
exertion
hunger
peristalsis pulling down
huge loads of sunlight
into the ***** gully
like bread and meat.

You will not see the bottom
no matter how hard you look.

If blood I am, then what kind of blood?
Unsettled and unsettling. The circulatory system
has an apt name: sometimes I can feel yesterday's blood
in the same neurons, saying the same thing.
I have no choice but to repeat it.
Time sheds its significance.
I have no continuity:
I have rhythms.

The new day, on fire and sitting in the trickle
you held a golden fish in your palm
as if you had made it by will
and cupped, it circled in the valley of your fingers
and I ate from the vision of care.

Erosion: isn't that what made these furrows?
I beg it to unmake me
flat like a seabed and many fathoms green
where the sun will never reach me.

In the penumbra of your anger
I do not fear dying,
only dying unclean.
Heights are all the same.
They would all break me and none would enough.
The grasshoppers and gecko hatchlings
all die in their way, rubbed in the hot dry dust.
Parched, I gnash my stone teeth
and tongue of chaparral -
I am making a song to say
die with me
but smile at me.

Then I see it through flashes of temper,
frame by frame, like a fingertip behind a pinwheel:
a dream of something distant that is also true.
Dreams of freedom alongside dreams of dying.

I can see the shafts of sunlight
amber slices through the air.
Gilded rays of fair approval
favor the betters basking there.

But, we live in the shadows;
The often seen but rarely known.
We, the great unworthy
take their experiences for our own.

This is life in the penumbra;
Unacknowledged, though intended.
We live lives by implication.
Rights derived, but not defended.

Nothing grows in the penumbra's
un-illuminated spaces.
Except the mass of shifting shadows
that your compassion rarely graces.

On the top of the white marble steps,  her pedestal
 she stands tall, head held high up in the clouds
that one moment I forgive all her sins
 for the self abandonment that deceives all of us.
It makes her an original,
though feeble minded, vainglorious, unabashed
self-deceptive about her past,
distorting light within to create darkness
each and every fact twisted
the way she wants others to believe,
see her gait, all are compelled
to view her grandeur as one of a kind.
She sings and her emotions flow like a river,
one can hardly find any flaw in her technique.
Eclipsed by her penumbra,I have no escape,
love her the way one loves a burned out life.