Poetry · Mexican Desert

Mexican Desert

The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive

trailing her rattling wooden tail

into the jazz-band sunset.⁠ ⁠…

The mountains in a row

set pinnacles of ferocious isolation

under the alien hot heaven

Vegetable cripples of drought

thrust up the parching appeal

cracking open the earth

stump-fingered cacti

and hunch-back palm trees

belabour the cinders of twilight.⁠ ⁠…