2 September 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 3

Saguaro Opening Over Quartzite, Arizona

by LAURA JOHNSON

Yearly returners to the empty desert lots

blossom in this wintering.

The view from space

makes the field of RVs

into the squat postage stamps

of another country.

In sun, they are a bronze

belonging to cicadas

crawled into a mailbox,

looking for the dark

in their wrong seventh season.

High power lines

inside a tin can, that's how the insects

come up singing, the radio

glowing with amber numbers

as it delivers the storm warning:

an evil wind off the Gobi

tracking the earth's rotation

will arrive and lift us

through its gasoline haze.

A desert traveler would counsel

meeting the simoom at the outskirts,

circling our trailers as armor

against that sweeping breath.

Without assets, this town refuses

the Roman miracle of plumbing, our vehicles

sufficient as Spanish wagons

whose dust wake we may have cultivated.

Still feeling the remnants

of a medicine show

under the corrugated canopies,

feeding on green tamales

while the gypsy in her piebald skirt

flashes colored geodes

strung off the rack of a long-horn steer.

So we pretend to live here

as the heat pitches

toward a triple digit apex

we'll never stay long enough to discuss,

already driving past dunes

separate as they lay down to weep

against this fierce Mongolian wind—

fricative of an eastern desert

seeding its irritant pearl

in the saguaro flower's

mouth of white petals

shocked past natural life.