There was a magic about that first winter,
a convergence of energies that swept
the desert like a blood oath,
never to return the same way again.
Playing music in bars drew invitations
for rafting trips through the canyons,
Texas on one side, Mexico on the other,
while gypsy moths flitted in your path:
the woman with dinosaur bones
built into her fireplace, a drug lord’s mistress,
people who lived in buses, caves, dynamite shacks,
jacals made of ocotillo and cattle panel. Their
lives reinvented, cobbled together from old
spare parts and whatever they could scrounge.
Surprise was the rain
falling from a dream you nourished,
a fragrance that chipped and flaked
like a chisel dug up from the Stone Age.
Here was no cop, no stoplight,
and the wind forecast your future,
told all you needed to know.
