Leaving Tulsa

Mexican Hat, Arizona

53 Mexican Hat, Arizona In the red desert where you were last seen, sails were heaving. Children had stretched flour sacks across two donkeys’ backs, strapped a mast from a cracked television frame. Pearled the starboard with red and blue trade beads, bottle caps stickered with white-bearded faces ripped from the capsized mission. Your daughter was there sitting in her captain’s seat, suspending a blown tire on ropes, spinning a wheel of Styrofoam tubing. You were watching the monsoon spread its ocean-colored palm. A siege of cranes inhaled their white breath. The children disappeared into a rush of hooves, the stampede of horses dimming the horizon left you adrift in the sand. Headlong now into darkening clouds, your body afloat on the road’s parched throat, I cast my atlas’s pages like snakes—how gingerly you lifted them hissing from dust to read their shimmer of scales. 54 Magdalena, when snakes spill out of the cracking earth it is not a sign of rain but the sound of a drought, of spiders weaving nets for water as the blueprint for a night sail of ribbons and sweetgrass pales like stars from your fingertips. Following that parade of sailors you were driving without a map, low on gas, with snakes in the trunk and the sound of horses in your throat as the sun began to sink and the ghost-ship your daughter steered dissolved into mineral hand-painted walls, those colossal, jagged coals of dissipating campfires. ...