Highway 80, by DONALD RAWLEY

I was thirteen in a desert

best left alone,

dry brown as a liver spot

on a truck driver’s hands.

Blackened, rubbed clouds stood

against fire eaten hills

like a lover.

Their sunset edges

brushed the ground.

My mother drove a baby blue

Cadillac with bare feet and a Coke

on Highway 80 to Yuma,

then San Diego and the Pacific.

Towns were strung like clay beads.

Aztec. Dateland. Mohawk.

For me their names were chants

I sang under the boom of jets

in an air solid as rain

after a summer of wasps.

In a ninety degree dawn

I pried moths off saguaros

with wings like fists.

I touched cracked mud shacks

with junk yard sinks,

old wood and pornography

half-buried in sand.

The heat made us stop.

Withdrawn and short tempered,

we ate early.

I clicked my boots together

under jukebox curtains

of ringtab and nickel.

We were small in the sky;

it was everywhere, torn blue

and yellow, changed, ancient.

I knew as a child knows

I didn’t belong.

We were a long way from Phoenix,

Sonoyta and the Sea of Cortez

and we waited for the desert to speak.

Mother was divorced a second time

but the desert remained mute

and relentless. Move on,

it gestured, move on

and grow old.

From “Duende” by Donald Rawley. (The Black Tie Press: $13.95; 74 pp.) Donald Rawley lives in Los Angeles. 1994 Reprinted by permission.