Colorado

Listen, you said,
rolling the window down
in still morning, winding
the crank of the gramophone
of this cold new day.

First, just the hush
of evaporating sand,
crumbling adobe—
we’d been watching the pueblos
thin around us all week.
Orange wisps swirling
upward into quartz sky.

We waited in near-light
until, from the depths
of some unseen celestial cave,
it came shivering up the backs
of the snow-dusted canyons,

a careful copper light
inching over the vertebrae
of obsidian mountains
etched into the horizon,
sun finally flowing
over the bone-dry mesa
in one trembling yawn:

some god’s whispering
life into day.