Itchy creases
Mojave folds
o making movies
is a desert art,
coughing up
images out of emptiness,
borrowing darkness
so we can see.

2.
Green cheap floral pattern
flaps around her knees,
the wind.
Her legs are dirty,
mud-stained calves,
but where did the water come from,
or is it blood?
In mind-stained emptiness
we see what she sees,
footprints leading away.

3.
No faces yet.
Image is not identity,
image is the other
singing at us
from across the canyon,
arroyo,
river of no water.
An image is all beckoning,
questioning,
a catechism, a mid-term exam,
an image is a question
that no one asks.

4.
We are left with what we see,
as that woman must be,
alone in the desert
where movement is implied
by absences alone.
The mesa vanishes.
The hawk is gone.

5.
It is as when we dream
we wake with a single
image in mind,
nowhere to go with it,
no one to take it away.
Get up out of bed, that
theater of the night,
shake my head,
the green cloth flipping,
whose footsteps are they,
where did they go?

                                         17 August 2020