Anza-Borrego Desert Blues

We were headed for the desert hills,
an atmosphere of road-kill
and a levitating hawkish heatwave
in a desert known as Anza-Borrego,
it is far removed from San Diego.
The desert teaches humans to behave,
you are conforming to the magnitudes,
they get you in the mood

for movement, where you’re risking life and limb
to know about the limits,
like a man who looks for definition
on the edges of the infinite.
It is elusive, shifting by the minute,
but the cacti have no inhibition
and the road is one long underline
of us. You can refine

your senses in a dried-up wilderness
where you are under duress,
the gravity and loneliness and rocks.
You could turn to stone or heated air,
a vacant territory wouldn’t care,
it is peaceful when the only clocks
are made of stone, an elemental meditation.
I may edit

what I write because it is imperfect,
but I can defect
to deserts in the south, the warm perfection
of chaotic human-less terrain,
it would be better if I took the train.
Determining an absolute direction,
with your sins forgiven by the land,
it’s giving you a hand.

My brother drove, we wanted to survive,
and so the four-wheel drive
is up our alley, with the law and order
out in force, illegal Mexicans
are in the hills and the Americans
have lost the will of definition. The border
is invisible, although it’s there,
a dry wind in my hair.

We negotiate enormous boulders,
though I’m getting older,
fifty-two. The rocks are so magnetic,
we are climbing with two hours of light out,
and we stumbled on a rocky hideout
more than once: a dirty and pathetic
site of empty water bottles, discarded
shirts. Life is hard

when you’re on the rocks. The two men climbed
until the rocks were rhyming
and the sticks were turning into lizards
with kinetic sudden disappearances.
The flowers making an appearance
on the cacti, they’re a bio-hazard
like a barrel full of needles. The ground
a broken lost and found

of bone and quartz, the dried-up excrement
of rodents, no cement,
the scattered fragments of disintegrated
fossils. I am missing information
in my ignorance, the rock formation
is an open book. The complicated
laws of matter in millennia,
and yet it’s lenient

the desert, having water and a cell-phone
and you’re not alone.
There was a harrowing experience
of walking on the side of the road, a thunder
alley, where your soul is torn asunder
by a passing semi in a sequence,
the metallic tonnage as it hurtles
through the air, it hurts.

We drove a mile or two and took a sandy
road, it comes in handy
when you want to get away. It ended
in a gate, a clothing optional
resort, the hills were unexceptional,
I don’t climb naked, pants are recommended,
a woman on the intercom, undressed
I would imagine. Impressed

with everything we get exploratory,
many a hidden story
lurking off the federal-beaten path.
There are remnants of an old commune,
a ghost town on the light side of the moon,
the isolation of the sociopathic
integrated with a retro soda
fountain and a load

of junk in someone’s yard. There’s no telling
what they might be selling:
recollections, cow-skull, and a toilet
with a fan, the arrow of a road sign
with a sense of direction and design,
a truck with broken windows. You intuit
the historic in the old debris
though many don’t agree

on the significance. A heavy chain
sends signals to the brain,
a door is leaning on a tree, old tires
and abandoned vehicles, Corona
Extra, “la cerveza mas fina,” foreign
people and domestic signifiers,
an old pink bathtub near a barbed-wire fence,
and everything makes sense.

It was an hour back to El Cajon,
we don’t talk on the phone
that often, it was non-stop on the road.
My brother said a man had trained for years
to be in the Olympics, his career
was put on hold, there was a faint foreboding
of his failure, working in a rut.
He didn’t make the cut.

We were driving across a bridge, a steep
ravine, he made the leap
from there. Retrieving the body was a chore.
Later on I’m seeing dark dead branches
like black lightning in the ground, the ranches
burned last year. The desert is hardcore
with reservations, there is culture shock
and rocks around the clock.

2.

On the hill behind my parents’ home
the predatory roam
on hot air currents and extended wing.
The skeleton of a cat, I hear coyotes
in the night, I would have taken peyote
twenty years ago if I was living
here, and blended right in with the background,
it is so profound.

Cutting flowers with a high-speed shutter
and a winged motor
passing overhead. The rattlesnakes
avoiding human contact, with my father
talking about – my mother doesn’t bother –
the origins of life. A few mistakes
occur in evolution, that includes
the neo-cons, a rude

excuse for human beings. A retired
minister with higher
consciousness, my father has his doubts.
The right-wing generates an old suspicion
and he isn’t going near “The Passion,”
tortured logic he can live without.
A lizard and a mockingbird will visit
him at home, I miss it.

I found a communist sickle in the shed,
it’s going to my head,
a colony of cacti is surrounded
by the tumbleweeds and I’m offended
by it. Their hegemony was ended
in a couple of hours, I am grounded
and intensified. The sweat is pouring
down my face. Reporting

the phenomena, it’s not for fun
and profit, and the sun
is hot. A pear cactus with some yellow flowers
in the spring, there is a bee, a blur
of instinct and necessity occurring
in the petals. Cutting weeds for hours
with a blade, attacking the entanglement,
the lethal angle

of a weapon, and before I stopped
I accidentally lopped off
part of a cactus, and some portions fell
because they were supported by the weeds,
it was collateral damage. But I need
to come here once a year and live to tell
about it, putting down a dirty tool
and diving in the pool.