Miss the Mojave

Miss the Mojave

(“All of you are children of light and children of the day. We don’t belong to night or darkness.” 1 Thessalonians 5:5)

All I can say is we finally arrived,
travelling all night; summers from Southern
Cali
made frightful a daytime passage through Needles.
90 degrees at midnight, the darkness was dense
as the day.

I missed the Mojave; shadows of yucca were
moonlight silhouettes that moved across the dark floor;
shadow boxes viewed from the back of our desert
whale cruiser. The black Rambler station wagon
swallowed the desert heat and smothered the sleep
right out of us. Dad never paid for air conditioning;
and if we had it, he wouldn’t run it,
we sacrificed cool comfort for increased gas mileage.

One summer we returned so quickly we had to brave
the pounding sun on cracked sand hot as concrete.
Though sweat beaded up and vanished in a single thought,
the colors grabbed our collective complaints as
the death the dark insinuated was alive with the light
we hurriedly pursued.

Prickly pears with tiny yellow blooms,
Beavertail with magenta on outcropped rocks,
Red spines on Mohave clusters spiked their diameter
in tangled mass; scarlet dots the side of the stems.

Mesa and flatland, thunderheads and chuckwallas
swing the panorama from station wagon panel to panel.

Life was scarce, true enough, but not the phantom we saw in the
careful midnight crossing.

The radiator blew, dad always knew, and we never flew again
without checking our watches for midnight across
the great Mojave.