Years later he recalls the roadrunner.
Dark brown shadow, flightless feathers and bones, 
it darted across the highway between ghost towns.

He knows it was silent.  Perhaps it was still.
It waited among the rocks, the creosote,
the bleached-out brush, the distance between 

the road and anything else—not quite 
mountains, snakes and scorpions, the railroad,
the interstate with gas stations and fast food

chains he knew from either coast. 
The bird pecked at a dead snake,
something he is glad she did not see.   

She does not remember the bird.
She wanted this place to be their Death Valley
where they wandered from ghost town to ghost town. 

Dazed by January’s fading sun, she saw
bleached rocks and bullet cases, remembers
the cemetery and its faded photographs.
 
Each night at the motel on Main Street,
the couple watched news from Chicago.
She wanted to hear coyotes in the alleys.

She wanted them to come down 
from the mountains to howl
at the city balanced on a knife’s edge.

She does not remember the bird.
                        

I sit, a dry leaf
curled up on a flat rock,
to watch water return.

It plashes down rock walls, 
buoys last year’s leaves,
sparkles in sunlight. 

If this were spring, we’d plunge in,
let our hair become seaweed
streaming between us,

but winter water shimmers,
reveals leafless branches
in liquid too cold to touch.

Above, the trees protect us
from January’s fierce sky.
We don’t know their names.

Touching their bark,
roots like gargoyles,
we cannot thank them.

You tell me this place is still desert,
these are not the trees we know,
lush in constant rain.

But water once covered this ground.
Even now the cliff atop the mountain
is streaked with ocean. The lives

that once lingered in warm waters
stain the bone-dry rock.
Unlike the rocks we know,
these disclose their past.