TOMLINSON

Arizona Desert

Eye

drinks the dry orange ground,

the cowskull

bound to it by shade:

sun-warped, the layers

of flaked and broken bone

unclench into petals,

into eyelids of limestone:

Blind glitter

that sees

spaces and steppes expand

of the purgatories possible

to us and

impossible.

Upended trees

in the Hopi’s desert orchard

betoken

unceasing unspoken war,

return

the levelling light,

imageless arbiter.

A dead snake

pulsates again
as, hidden, the beetles’ hunger

mines through the tunnel of its drying skin.