Desert poem

We are sand broken off the rock of God

---

Where is he if not in the swell of the Ordos?

Is he in the vacant eye of the bird-headed infant Christ?

Dwarfed by men on muleback

A hoofclap is a pilgrim’s malformed sermon

Seeded in the ivory and the backseat teens—

Lovers lovelessly abound in their grim fixations

The skies are bitter

The moon did stove the clouds

And the night faded into the depths of darksome radiance beyond the west.

Has death carved deformity from the marble of our being?

Cursing us for our temperament?

Is god deformed and are we in his image?

Maybe our holy father is a dullard of his own making—

Dumbly watching his grotesque children