Ghost Dance at Arches
By David Lee
For my mother, with love
A Lilith moon’s half ghost,
goddess of the neaps,
flareskirts the fenestrated mesa,
a white mussel fossil
above trundled clouds
shimmering from the backlight
First breeze
The cuesta asleep,
curled into the cave
of its own dream,
a soft movement
like the tug on the mind’s reins,
desert a glass bowl, golden,
skimmed with dust
Clouds flex and mumble,
shove the winds before them
as they begin their pour
over the scarpland,
a tsunami untethered,
ready to scour the bajada basin
Creosote branches
claw the storm’s bellyfur,
bend and rive
half uncials in sand
Night collapses upon itself
as dark wind
rips a slash through black sky
with a gnarled finger
Stars’ splattered embers
kindle like a lost
fragment of lightning
The gash opens
to moon firedamp,
St. Elmo’s light through the sandstorm
on the ancient sea’s floor,
an ocean’s manes, rises
from its crypt, glides
A lever of dawnseep
on the fulcrum
of Moab sandstone
pries the dark to unearth
radiant copper
Crisp windy morning
crosses over a billowing
green sea of creosote
ravel of bird waltz and moon drift
like the rustle of waves
pulling away from tule grass
David Lee, the former poet laureate of Utah, has published
17 books of poetry and is now completing two new manuscripts.
He and his wife Jan are retired—declared defunct by
at least two Utah organizations—and are now nomads and
vagabonds, wandering the back roads and byways of the
United States.
