a return


Of Cities and Deserts

One: The City

There were bright days, the kind of bright that makes you feel like your thoughts can be seen through your head. Miranda was able to see my thoughts, but hers were obscured under all that preternaturally red hair. I wanted to know what she was thinking, why she stared so intently at the high rounded walls of the building. When in conversation, she looked at me, her aquiline face inspiring in me a protective, fearful emotion. Miranda was blinking her eyes, and I couldn't tell if it was because of all the light reflected through the concrete canyons from the glass towers, the dry smoke coughed from the buses that lumbered by like old fat men, or because her eyes were drawing in my visible thoughts, carelessly chewing them up into mentally-digestible shreds.

Miranda had a purse, inlaid in crude sequins. Some of them were pulled, lost to a distant street or a table corner or just entropy. She drew from it, with the ease of habit, a clove cigarette and a single wooden match. In the shadow of a building, where the breeze was calmer, she struck the match against the granite wall. For a second, the flickering red-white flame of the burning phosphor cast strange strobing shadows, forcing on me the memory of the city at night: loud buzzing neon and mercury arcs, sickly yellow sodium lamps, and Miranda's blinking eyes, reflecting words that couldn't be read, pupils wider and more distant than they should have been.

The city at night was an inspiration for Miranda. The dry, labored breath of high commerce through the day became the wet hum of street biz when the shadows from the metal canyons crested over the basin. We stood in front of a club on Fairfax, and she talked about the city at night: the towers standing on corners and in rows, from a distance they glittered: a beacon, or a bait; she reminded me that under the inert slabs of trimmed stone were skeletons of iron and steel.

Two: The Desert

We were in the place where radio stations lost coherence,
underpowered into random noises. We were in the place
where the colors began to emulate sun, clay, and rust.

        Along the plain a swirling breeze 
        toyed lazily with the leaves
        from a place whose trees 
        were distant, and hidden.

We pitched our tent beneath a rock popular for climbing
and sat around a fire that sounded like our radios. We debated
things uncommon to us, like time and space and philosophy.

        In the star-drenched northern skies, 
        the streaks begged of every eye
        only a mute and full surprise
        before they faded.

Miranda wrote mysterious things in her notebook. She said
it's been to four continents, and I believed her, but I doubted
whether she had been with it. We were accustomed to incredulity.

        While the flames had shuddered through,
        the conversation turned anew
        to her lovers' names and who
        Miranda dreamt of.      

Sleep came upon us like the sunset did earlier, suddenly
shifting through darkening colors of emotion. Through darkening
colors of consciousness, she dreamed the sounds of the city.

        In my dream, she held my hand
        on a shifting plain of sand
        colored silver, and the land
        shifted slowly.

The fixed stars spun around us, shifting against each other,
then away. We found occasion, separate like worlds and oblivious 
like children, to murmur something thick into the air between us.

        When I woke I found her writing
        in the notebook. I was fighting
        to see what my love was hiding
        in her journal.

Miranda and I walked around the tent, where our sleep felt
like hours of waiting rather than a vacant moment. Miranda 
reminded me that there were veins of metal in the living rock.

Three: One Wasteland to Another

The rises and drops in the road seemed to be timed to music that I couldn't hear. They were regular and round, but brought enough of a jolt to give me a sense of rhythm. Miranda read to me from her notebook, a speckled book which said only 'composition;' I knew it meant just that. Some fragments of secret and whisper that she was to free from her confidence in lined paper she claimed to have read in the tracks of the shooting stars the night before. Some she claimed to have heard in my mouth when we kissed. She read some fragments to a tune, others contained unnatural pauses, timed for effect with the heaves and drops of the road underneath us.

"rocks here look like palmprints or maybe the fallen tears of marble statuary."

Miranda paused to pull an errant lock of hair from before her eyes with a preoccupied fingertip.

"He wondered why I won't quit smoking these damn things. He asked me if I wanted to kill myself like that. I said it doesn't matter how I do it."

During each pause, papers and pages loudly fought one another for her eye. I watched the median and the shoulder. Permutations of circumstance were shuffling through my mind. It was a noisy way to divine why she was reading these concealed things to me.

"when we stand under the floods in the lot, that sound feels like it's inside of me. like those colder days when the radiator dies, it's the feeling in cold joints as they flex."

Miranda was looking at black lines on white paper, and I was watching the hills turn from brown to green to red Spanish-tile roofing. In the mirror, there were the mountains, whose metals were in veins in the rock. Over a ridge, I saw the stretching fingers of the city we live in, the skeletons of concrete and steel. While Miranda read to me, I wondered what it meant.