Cold pierces the desert, bleeds love too weepy
to keep.  Feel ice form in your hollows,
pieces that twinkle in sync with the stars.  Scratchy scurry
of a night lizard outside by the potted flowers.

Childhood secrets clack.  No order to your disorder, no border
to the father.  This one was—they are all—your father. 
Blame thwarts dreams of luminous extension. 

Put on your eyeglasses, step with bare feet onto the brick patio.
Here, have a cigarette.  Mourning doves moan ooah-ooo-oo-oo. 
A car rolls past the Ocotillo.
Forty days no rain, it’s been forty days.  No rain.

Tomorrow, you can dream of lovers dusted, catalogued,
aligned.  Don’t look up now—sparkle trellises the sky. 
You’d only sigh at the flaming silence
of early August meteors. 
In this darkness you can’t hear a second chance.