The planet’s skin erupts, arranges rock,
and makes escapement for a stellar clock,
while we are butterflies against the walls,
more fleeting than the desert waterfalls
(like birds or lizards darting in this place,
we touch the shadows on the desert’s face).

There’s marble walls and fields of golden stone,
a mauve ceramic crater lately thrown,
a plant that bleaches under mounting light
to ivory skeleton of washout white,
and bowls of canyon shoulders everywhere
that shimmer arid mistiness in air.

Although the place is endless, ancient, wild,
the shape’s a cradle here, and I’m a child.