line of stakes

every hundred feet
a pine lath and a tail
of pink ribbon.

by afternoon they run
to the edge of seeing,
a sentence the land
did not ask for.

tomorrow, the road.
tonight the wind reads it
one flag at a time.

creosote, after rain

four months of nothing,
then twenty minutes
of rain like thrown gravel,

and the whole flat
breathes out resin and dust
and something older
than the name we gave it.

her hand

at the crosswalk
my daughter's hand
finds mine without looking,
the way a plumb bob
finds down.

I have measured
ten thousand acres.
nothing else I hold
is the right size.

benchmark

a brass cap in the caliche,
set before my grandfather was born.

someone knelt here
with this same sun on his neck
and wrote the number down.

I read it back to him.
it still holds.

no moon

east of town, below the gila mountains,
the truck ticking as it cools.

so many stars
the dark has to squeeze
between them.

I turned off the flashlight
and stood there
until my eyes
gave me back my hands.

ocotillo

three days after the storm
it is green to the tip of every cane,
as if it never doubted.

in two weeks it will drop them all
and go back to waiting,
which it is also good at.

field book

pencil only.
ink runs in the rain.
pencil stays.

every page
a place where I was once
exactly.