Dust and dusky archways stooped in the low smoking sundown/Red thrum of insects, quiet street beyond time-dappled with ruin/Pattern of the frost upon his open lips/Lying, hands outstretched, back shattered by a crippled/Horse, eyes whirling, writhing in a thicket of mesquite/Till you wake with the heaving of its pulse and the terrible certainty of its existence/A secret and subtle Judas/Wayward, grasping nail/Coiled without intent, compassion, malice, will or reason/A beckoning window, a crumbling staircase falls/Such a small spine that lames the mount/Ground’s rush to greet the rider/From a womb of stillness and ashen grit/Its birth portends infinite endings/Sunstroke, hunger, nest of hornets/Reeling at the yawning precipice/Frail lattice of causality, glass cold against your teeth/Gazing out the door across the hill, into the great howling grayness beyond/Astride a rotten tree hanging over a flooded embankment/Its branches dip the churning darkness and slip into the wash/We slip into the roaring wash. — “This is the great reward. Maybe this is the only reward. Maybe this is the final purity all ringed with filth.”