It’s a place people go,
not the one that they come from.
It’s somewhere between here and there for them,
thin as the aging and sagging skin
hanging from a saint’s sleeping bones.
This world
between
worlds is something.
It is emptiness and silence
beneath an infinity of unobscured stars,
heaven’s-host clear in the night.
Hundreds of miles of sagebrush stretch out,
interrupted occasionally by an empty road
or an abandoned mining town
where the wood of old buildings
falls to
decay,
becoming dust again.
The desert becomes more of itself.
I wonder
if all that drew its first breaths here
are destined to settle again in the valley?
My bones, still walking, ache,
broken in over a life
in a place defined by drought.
Is this the reason for my thirst?
My roots seek water
in dry and dying dirt.