Thunderbird

This was an attempt at translating this photograph into words:

I really loved the colors of the bricks; it made me think of a desert, and then I started reminiscing about the time my family went out hiking at a national park in Arizona, got lost, and had to hitchhike our way back to our car. I hope the memory aspects of the poem helped translate the image itself.

All comments appreciated!

"Brick"


We forget the four wooden walls
that pressed their shape into rust-red clay—
the color of the dust on our shoes
from when we walked quartz crystals into the Arizona desert
and burned them clean beneath a ceiling of sun
so we could hear their voices:

a Thunderbird call,
sweet and high like the pounding of blood in our veins.

In the clarity of dried and smoking sage bundles,
a small image of you and me
gives itself over to the cactus plants
sprouting through the cracks that form
at right angles to each other.
We were told about the way we made our crystals part of the desert.

We got lost in the labyrinth of saguaros—lightning rods
in a sea of dust and stone.
In a moment of truth we held brush twigs in our hands:
baby thunderbirds
crackling against their cages,
whose mother's call guided us back to the highway.

The pattern beneath my feet is a stairway,
a bolt of lightning.
We sweep thunder under our wings and in our wake.