Coyote Crossing

Letters from the desert: Back

...and then off again, heading south to watch election coverage with The Raven. But I wanted to report that my Taos pal got great news: no sign of metastasis and expectation of full recovery. Go Team Us! More soon, and thanks to all of you who

Letters from the desert: Dark

A few hundred miles of desert two-lane at night, no radio nor moon nor competing traffic to interfere with the cascade of thought, and the dark folds itself in around my pallid headlamps. The high-beams have developed a disconcerting tendency to go

Vox Clamantis in Deserto

If the next President makes good on his promise to expand the use of nuclear power plants, the desert will pay.

The desert always pays.

Even if it’s the “safe nuclear power” that those of us in the extreme environmentalist community care about.

Letters from the desert: Jarhead

At the wheel on Saturday afternoon, The Raven flinched. “What the…?” A low black sports car came out of nowhere behind us on Kelbaker Road, passed us doing at least 40 miles per hour more than our sedate 60 or so, and straddled the center line as

Letters from the desert: Crotalus scutulatus

Were one to insist on a strictly rational, actuarial accounting of the risks involved, one would of necessity admit that the little meeting The Raven and I had Saturday with the most dangerous snake in North America was not the riskiest thing

Regarding The Raven

I walked out into the desert today after an afternoon of thunderstorms. The sun set, as it will, and I sat in the darkening on the gravel berm of the unmaintained road I’d walked along for a half hour or so.

The night desert sky, pale northward

Letters from the desert: Light and Sound

This valley I live in is quiet.

It’s not silent. Sometimes, in fact, there is a hell of a lot of noise here. Eighteen-wheelers roar down the road in front of my house fairly often, as do RVs ridiculously towing boats through the desert toward the

Letters from the desert: Seeing stars

Another sunset, another sky over the Clark and Ivanpah ranges turned by imperceptible increment from deep blue to blood red, the slow tilting of earth and air erasing shade after subtle shade from sky. Soon all that is left is sanguinary. Soon that

Letters from the desert: Full Disclosure

Ed Abbey had a wife and kid in the trailer with him in Arches while he wrote some of Desert Solitaire. Despite the opening of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the old fighting tomcat did not actually leap in through Annie Dillard’s window and knead her

Letters from the desert: Raven Moon

Full moon a glint in The Raven’s eye and it drenches us in light. Sable sky bears a feathery sheen upon it. A moon-suffused cool smolder masks the stars.

Joshua trees raise arms toward the pale night sky. The Raven’s shoulder fits beneath my own.

Letters from the desert: Cholla garden

How swift it is this heart can shift, can shed old sadness as a snake sheds scales, new clarity of vision coming as old skin falls from athwart the eyes.

The Raven’s eyes sparkle in the desert sun.

I am abraded, skinless. I am that part of the

In the light of day

In the light of day
even the desert asphalt
sparkles like diamonds.

Obsidian heart
bleeds joyous carnelian;
my eyes turn … (continues)