Cut Flowers

The desert is made of dust so fine

it whips into the air at first breeze

and makes a mud as thick as plaster

that dries on first strike of sunlight;

so white it is like chalk chipped

from the peach or salmon wall

and bleached by the sun and washed by the gray

sky building over the Shiprock.

The girl from the city lived in the desert

in an orange apartment with linoleum walls

and a tattered yellow canvas bag on the swamp

cooler maintenance failed to turn on again until May

when the sun could dry a load of laundry in ten

minutes before the sole morning dove could manage

to fix the stick she fetched from the canal–that brought

the San Juan to the farms and swept a Rez dog to its death

pinning it against the rails of the siphono–to her nest

which swayed in the branches that grew from a leak

in the old government provided apartment.

The woman doctor's living room was filled with books

she hadn't read, yet, and plants from the pacific northwest

She could diagnose your transient global amnesia or deliver

your baby but could not tell you which way to turn the bolt

to tighten it on the bicycle she rode to make her thick brown

hair which smelled of sandalwood and palo santo flair across

the white roads a podcast drowning out her broken heart.

She found a way to make it work here, the only childfree

well into bearing years. A whole year, every day she drove up stream

to the town where he left her, bought a frozen dinner and cut flowers,

so that the living room with its white walls was painted red

from roses, pink from snap dragons, yellow-white from lilies

pushing one vase to the edge of the table to make room for yet another

the whole room turning to a maze with flowers of various dryness

either primming up with youthful delight or stiffly sagging downwards

against the dusty dry mason jar.

the apartment smelled of soil, life, and fragrances so poignant

they seemed artificial, in the three-block ‘round neighborhood

cropped up out of the desert sand to make room for the workers

who take care of patients at night.