Scenes Floating in Memory

Scenes Floating in Memory

Out of Aravaipa

From White Water Draw by the border,
after watching birds and still seeing the bright throb
of our first vermilion flycatcher through freezing rain,
    we headed north again. A distant checkpoint

on two-lane blacktop grew in the windshield.
Hand on his sidearm, a guard with shades leaned
in to ask our names and where we were from.
    A German shepherd with another guard

on a long leash sniffed and circled our car
for the nothing we had to declare
but the glory of shrikes, eagles, and the high honking
    of a thousand cranes still floating in memory.

Rough roads climbed into Aravaipa Canyon.
We rattled over cattle guards past ashen scrub
and clusters of prickly pear toward The Chimneys
    that some old friends had told us to see

before a sign finally told us to stop—flash floods.
Road impassable, even for an off-road Jeep.
Lines of blue-black clouds piled up like curses kept
    to ourselves. Quiet helped us imagine

what we rumbled over these desert dirt roads for
and now wouldn't see—those rock formations
sculpted by an outsized alien tripping on acid.
    So we turned about and headed for Bonito,

an unfindable place up switchbacks
out of Aravaipa into the mountains around a curve
to a sudden vista—endless snow peaks and
    long shadows taking the sage flats below.

We got out, stepped onto a ridge in time
to spot a javelina disappearing into scrub, silence
now deep as the canyon at our shoetips. At first
    not a trace of the human in all this distance,

then far below, like images from a lost language,
a mass of white, bonking and bleating, reshaping
itself before a herder on horseback and a border collie
    moving toward a corral in the quickening dark.

Toledo, Spain

What has stayed in mind isn't
so much the blue Islamic designs

or reflecting pools in the Alcazar
or the Santa Cruz with so many

paintings of stylized Annunciations,
Nativities, and Assumptions

but this guy pulling suitcases,
three large wheeled bags, one

attached to another, a train really,
clack clacking in front of the café

until they get stuck on the curb.
Face glazed with sweat, he loudly

clears his throat as if to speak
but aims instead an angry look

at his young tight-skirted lover
lagging at a store window,

a look that says
the least you could do is help

this miserable bag-train over the curb,
which she does, watching me

watch her bend beautifully,
then blesses me with a wink and a smile.