Purgatoire

Roger Mitchell

The hot valley, to call it a valley, a wide flat winding
between mesas, crumbs as big as a boxcar tumbled
off its edges, trainwreck of  sedimentation's hardtack.
The ghost of a glacier, threading a few cottonwoods,
licked at the roots of  a line of   tamarisks. Water
has to go somewhere, if only away. People,
as well, a few bungled contraptions for shelter strewn
in the heat and dust, substratum of  fine gray silt,
once the bed of a sea, dust finer than air.
We slipped down to the slim river, thin chiseler
to the swirling, muscular carver it once was, to look
at extinction's hieroglyphics. A few hundred tracks
in the locked mud, and two children splashing
in the sun. Such big feet and a lope you could try to follow,
as some of us did, imagining what it must be
to be large and unstable, staggering across a lan
that supported at best now a few flowering lichens,x
some grasses, and the occasional migrating flock
of  birds looking for water on the way to places
that, though slower, also have somewhere else to be.