I’m an obscure figure in an obscure field.
From your desert camp, I appear as a myriad of forms,
both near and far, but always distorted.

I’m the green-grey spikes of an agave, never blooming,
sharply uniform in the nebulous night.

I’m a jagged juniper, a charred evergreen
hard against the moon’s reddening radar jewel.

I’m a pack of abject riders, ravenously converging
in the shadow of a ravine to conspire against all belief.

I’m the skeletal beams of a broken outpost,
receding into the ghost of a chance
muttered in your forefather’s forgotten language.

I’m all of these aspects, all of these ill dreams,
all of the possible obscenities of desperation
in a time of leaden luck and lost blessings.

From your fireside of smoldering fears,
bitter coffee and cold bandolier,
the dry word and strained shoulder
cross one another like uneasy spirits.

From your forsaken watch, caught among the masses
of dreamed ends and thin means, I deliver life in halves.

From your once even, blue-eyed gaze into the confusion
of the monsoon season, I cloud all sense of duty with reservations
until the angles of your landscape and safety of your footing
give way to the calculations of sleepless reasoning.

What danger, real or imagined, awaits you lies in the semantics of sand
crunched under boot heel, or maybe with the few stars still visible
above the layers of haze that build upon your thousand refusals.

I’m the cause and embodiment of this insecure age.
Some had their cyclopses and some their sphinxes,
but you have only your brother, your riddled,
ambivalent about face with a familiar devil.

We consume one another at eye level as the distance drags itself
into a dilating pupil: this is where we meet, arm in arm,
where the wound bleeds and closes in the same breath.
This is the desert where you and I wrestle with what’s left.

Caleb Puckett