Recorded Ourselves

It was laying in a box waiting.
All the memory recorded on a tape.
Disposable.
Or priceless if you listened.

"Hey that was me," the words of youth.

What form now wraps around my heart
like rope, squeezing under
the bulging weight of feelings without words,
of all the loss
and the sound of not knowing in your voice.

Something of existence that lives on,
some leave behind of us
so the world knows the story,
so it cares that we had names.
Such is the deep living pain,
to leave nothing.
So human the sadness
and the hope.
Such is a hollow, hollowness
all round and quivering with fear.
To die alone.
To die out.
To be nothing but dust and
memory, briefly
before you fade from Earth.

Fall Your Rain O’er My Desert Mountain, Dear

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Each surrounding peak slopes sharply upward 

spilling black talus down its ribs

through fields of pale green prickly pear 

clinging to the mountainous terrain. 

Occasionally, as in a rhythm, the hills cleft near their precipice

and rise again in two discrete masses, 

revealing remote canyons unreachable but for birds and wild unknown animals. 

Local rumors speak of hidden prehistoric ecologies 

harboring giant and tropical flora never seen by human eyes, 

of secret grottoes where sweetwater spills from split-rock faces 

and tumbles into dark pools that lay in permanent shadow, 

Of jaguar that hunt there, 

enormous cats somehow strayed off course on their journey from distant southern regions, 

drinking from remote, perennial water tanks, to come down the mountain 

only for the occasional range cow.