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1
In desert light, an incertitude of gray availability and the crissal thrasher picking the meat from stone,
forms the ritualized sleep of an amateur botanist. Called from a cloud of silvered in the night dust that
lifts him dry and undisrubbed. It is a small chalet that holds the curve of his spine in shards; where he
slips along the corrugated zinc roof in swaths of moon, disappearing into sound under the umbral
projection of the butte and brush. Appeared again in the moon some yards away. There are cacti that he
keeps. And in the morning, waking from sleep reset to function, they are kept that remain. Hours in
desert light going between each spine with his finger to rub the waxy skin of they that remain, they that
double in size with water and they that wither the crissal thrasher picks clean. What lasts as his last
fetish is the photo of her breast at last healed on the night stand beside which the bed is as wide as
desert light permits. The desert rabbit, its ears kissed with greeting and come to escort him, paws at the
architrave. He pauses in the doorway, the rabbit staring up at him before the desert light, before his
walk through desert light to mete the devil.
2
They come down on clouds, quiet. Until they have formed, small and distant on the horizon, from the
fey light that draws them myth. A sound grows from a tramping of earth, digging their hooves fast. Few
feral remain that freely roam the flatland light, neighing in turns and rearing skyward in displays of
authority and forced submission. Behind the shunted light caused of stallions, the mares attend to each
the weanlings and yearlings cavorting, kicking up dust and dirt in mimesis, covered from coronet to
croup until their legs give way. They dumb-stare into the wide flatland light while the mares, with grace,
from their withers and in turns, lower their long necks and shake their heads as if in disapproval.
This tide occurs once yearly and never in the same season. Now is the season of the chief mustang’s
arrival from the asymmetry of light that draws them here to kneel at his door and, nose to muzzle, draw
breath its hard flesh rasp with wet and hair heavy and to break them in His hands raking along the
barrel It licks the air and snaps with its teeth the naïve mucus yellow in its eye until it hardens.
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3
The desert grows glass and opaque. For the gadelles of the breakdown, his right ear pressed to the
ground. It is impossible, from a seated position, to know the breeding condition. He slows his breathing,
inhaling less the dust to narrow the vessels in his body and hold taut his muscles for greater acuity. For
the sound of them, an unduly pulse in the grain, and their locus of origin. He picks up, untensing in the
cranial light, pulling white flesh like lily pads from the wet morass in the crook of his arm, to rid the
store.
Then to attend to a hen born infebrilary.
4
To enter the complex in the south light where gather the gadelles he would have to crawl the stocks, the
straw and filth. Beneath skin they burrow, amassing clusters of nerves like wires between their
mandibles. Some fortunate enough to have survived these gadelles describe the experience as a more
than rummaging of the soul. It is not solely that his skin will be on fire, but all sense with it will be given
to conflagration. Should these gadelles fail to impede him, bellymandering through the whip of it, he
would have to then contend with the weary bite of them ill broken in, ripping the brocade from fear, of
your pleasures, shall be least to shroud himself in the scent of the chief familiar and assuage herd suspicion.
These tasks: to enter the complex.
He is near enough now that I can taste the smell of him, covered from coronet to croup and trembling,
waiting to begin the war of attrition.
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