Comment on this article

Death Valley
by Ed Bennett

The wind washes cool
across the desert floor
bearing the debts of predation
and the desiccating heat
into the calyx of the night.

The ghost track
of the servile coyote
leads me voiceless
to the lambent glow
of a burnished moon;
I am cleansed of the burdens
of concrete and relevance,
naked in the eternal theme
of a star drenched sky
covering the silent scape
of the whispering dust.

There are no secrets
in this desert,
no sign in the valley save
for the varnished symbols
of the few survivors
who lived their moment
then moved on.

There are no secrets,
just the prayers
of a wing's movement,
of claws scuttling
to a sunken den.

Tensile steel will break
against the song,
the echo of older gods
among the Joshua trees.

Valley of Death.
Valley of Living
in the perishing shadow
that bypassed the aged stones.

My arms orant,
I give myself
to the cleansing wind,
the hollow glow
of the waxing moon,
the hard dry ground
where eternity dwells
far from the grasp
of the temporal city.