"You cannot map a desert, for it is breathing."

A travelling man with straw hair gave me a map
of the desert and later turned out to be a hallucination.
the map contained my feet, bare and blistered,
as spots in sector A7, though I felt a rock nearby
would do better in blue than dried-out green.

I ask the map for names, though it cannot trace her
contours or find the water she cups in both hands,
and it tells me she is a desert with the syllables
of her name spoken with every step gravity rejects.

Sometimes the night tells me I’m going west
and other times it tells me the horizon awoke
in the east or south-by-north, lost in its own compass
because they forgot to turn the highway lights on.

In the daytime, the sky moulds to her curves, shaping
a horizon from twisted rhymes and broken poetry.
Planes (like pilgrims) find their wings clipped,
feathers dropped into watercolour tattoos
for artistic licensing, and nothing more.

Somewhere in the weedy fictions that populate
my mind, I see her lying belly-up, breathing
like the sun will melt her skin and make her as sand,
the sort that sweeps between the sable doily skies
and hugs a new landscape, turning it yellow.

I could tell you the nursery rhyme I first heard
from her lips; of a travelling man who never knew
her name, burning in the sand and passing on
a map that rewrites itself too slow and leads
me around in circles until flames follow my feet.