DESERT SUNSET

To us facing west at near sunset, the San Bernardino mountains form a bare outline behind a rising night-sheen of light, as the desert gives to the coming night its little moisture of the day - the misty veil is stripped away into broad blueness and the darkened mountains emerge onto the stage of evening, the tips of their jagged silhouette still flecked with snow.

To the south the San Jacinto mountains rise into stars above the sage-scented mist whose vapors blow to us on a steady wind, wind that has a texture of its own, as water does, airwater flowing in a mountain stream vast as the air through Coachella Valley --

As it nears the mountains, the blinding sun shrinks to the ball of light it is, the mountain shadows racing toward our place - out here it is easy to understand the ancient honors bestowed upon the sun by the first of ourselves, who could see it as it is without the broadening restrictions of science - it sinks behind the stone shadow of the mountains now, rendering their majesty in lines upon the edge of night that takes their jagged shape as it rises from the desert ground and fills with stars --

As the river of desert air, bearing all its fragrances, sinks into our evening beings and there evokes the ancient lives that were borne on the very bones that bear us now - lives that knew those fragrances and all they have ever meant - they speak in soundless words we have not, after all, forgotten, that there is no end.