She drafts West Texas
with its contradictions of tongues and heat,
potpourri of yellow-hand dawns
and orange-mouth dusks
yawning over desolate flatlands.
She doodles knots of tumbleweeds
outside the margins of skimpy-grass plains
after a failed revision of a mesquite's thorny arms.
She scribbles in long-hand the prickly pear,
pine oak forest, and juniper savannahs.
She hums the ambient drone of cicadas
and the weepy yaps of coyotes
while scrawling over the Guadalupe Mountains.
When caliginous light crawls
over El Capitan’s rugged crest,
she stretches her back
and leans over with the sharp of her elbows
into the boundaries of night.
When the sky, that ancient archivist,
opens dusky records of the heavens,
she sits on her wide rump
in her ruched dress of solitude.
Her hem drags across the desert
as she writes run-on sentences with the stars.
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