L’Heure Bleue
What are they that move
Through these rooms without even
The encumbrance of shadows?
—Tracy K. Smith
In a land so sharply lit
Of such vast emptiness dry scrubbed
Of rock ocotillo and arroyos
Framed by mountains canyoned
Toothed and mesa flat a sky
That won’t release one’s gaze
The blues of it with broods of marbled cumuli
Veined grey and blue the sky
Its clouds receding to horizons
The bottom mete the mountains
Always mountains
In this land cast shadows jar one’s vision
Vultures’ moving shrouds sweep mesas
Juniper and pine ebb and flow
On canyon walls a butterfly’s dark splash
Across the rock the scrub the sandy soil
Shadow’s other side comes traveling
In the midst of this sharp clarity dust whirling
Devils out on cattle range in suddenness
Become a gusting gale where all is dun
No shadow no horizon a day of this
The curtain lifts again
The boundlessness of earth and sky
Toy freights traversing the desert vastness
Toyed with by the mountains’ masses
Yet seductive and hypnotic engines barred
Burnt orange gold and black
Underscore the ground of bistre coffees duns
The hybrid power’s push and pull of miles
Of rolling stock Gallup the dark twilight’s
Wounded reds its pumpkin oranges
Its yellows now hairbreadth streaks
Below the brush wash up to midnight blue
A silvered nick of moon
The engines and their stock
A rolling shade
While blink between these silhouettes
Of cars of coal and double stacks
The city lights on 66 the spark of tracks
The vultures roost the butterflies
The devil dust the rolling stock
The Mother Road the hour blue
From sorrows or from dreams
From fear or from our open hearts
From shadows lost or blue
From shadows found
