Joshua Tree National Park, Twentynine Palms, California
She pictures the boulder they call skull, then her eyes close.
That grotesque head calls out from the wonderland of rocks.
It calls out from twisting granite monoliths and other stones
as sharp as bone shards; from lost palms long gracing
a salt-white oasis; from dust hills colored almond and ochre
by a rush of sun; from the arid garden square
where yellow-green chollas grow. That is one desert,
where her thought is only water. This is another.
Desert of thought, consciousness lost on the operating table,
her body is a copper mine long forgotten, and her head rests
in the hands of surgeons unearthing a tumor.
Rock of the brain, a patient rain hollows holes in stone.
Head in the desert, she returns there with a skull eroded.
