Purgatoire

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.