Sands

The days grow shorter

and the desert nights cooler

now September fades away

The soft hiss of sand over sand eases

the setting sun out of the bloodlit sky

and shadows creep across the ground like

spreading pools of careless ink

in the east

The full moon already rides the cloudless sky

soon to be a silver rain upon

the nighttime

a rattlesnake far away lifts its head in greeting

Each night before going to sleep as a boy

I used to come here--to my

own part of the desert--where I knew

every scent with the rattlesnake

and the patterns as well as the owl

drifting noiselessly above

And each night at midnight while I waited breathless

he would canter in

my wild pony

suspicious of the wind and stars

he'd regard me nervously from ten paces away

The same scene again and again

a banded lizard scuttling from cactus

to cactus

the pony's whiffling questing nostrils

and my own outstretched hand

with the sweetest of red apples

dripping juice from its virgin white interior--

succulent flesh in my mouth

Each night we'd trade our treasures

for him the bitten apple

for me the wild musk of desert horses

like peyote on the wind

and in five minutes he would be

galloping for distant rock mesas

and I would be asleep

who mourns for Odysseus knows--

knows that Circe was but a child

compared to his victorious and omni-

potent enemy time

not to Ithaca did he return as

himself--but as another

and it was other to him

art even thou Telemachus?

Arizona dawn has no joy for the weary

and the night has brought

with it only the scent of distant fire flowers

and I know it's time to be on the road again

to San Francisco in my white Oldsmobile

to the ocean

and home

Christopher J. Cramer

March 3, 1984