Santa Fe

by Sam Cavnar-Johnson

This is a reoccurring dream of mine, sir, all the time, what if I had told someone about it. I knew about it enough in advance and perhaps it could have been prevented.

—A. L. Rowland

I “Rain”

Darkness approaches the mountains; unmatched in their quiet dignity,

greeting the dusk with judgmental silence, they watch the caminos,

the headlights of hurrying travelers flickering signs of their cowardice

clumsily matched with the brilliant pointillist canvas above them.

Rainfall seems sinister deep in the desert; it ridicules homeseekers,

flashing with malice, ablaze with the glibness of fading sunset.

The water is mocking the desert inhabitants, soaking with hunger.

Something about precipitation’s rarity makes the

petrichor striking here in the desert. Down by the coastline,

where storm clouds could wring themselves day after day without end and continue

onwards to terrorize inland communities, that smell of the aftermath

never afflicted minds unburdened by thoughts of scarcity.

Here, the celestial spheres, unflinching in dutiful motion,

remind us even as they would reward our tireless patience

that everyone serves the cyclical whims of that pitiless power.

Carefully cars and their drivers begin to return to the covers

remotely compelled to protect their heads from the gaze of the mountains.

Even the windshields are tinted blue by the oncoming twilight.

Deathless and silent, the peaks interspersed among the aquarian

clouds still dominate where the pollution has struggled to conquer.

II “Vision”

Beauty is measured by holy faith. The remarkable things are the

shadows of derelict ages, the images born from meandering

dust clouds, dispersed through the sky by the sighing and wheezing of potentates.

Kings of the past are reduced to the tangerine faces of memory.

Long is the life of forgetfulness, shorter is destiny’s wingspan;

something sinister issues from under the desert horizon,

the bound of boundless deception. Beauty is measured by holy

faithlessness, here in the merciless city of sorrow’s nativity.

Visions of mystic messiahs abound in the heat of the desert.

Spiritual apathy seizes the witness of fallow landscapes,

displaying ridiculous trophies upon the shelves, and the silence

pokes its relentless expressions above their dripping foreheads.

Maliceful eyes land wonderfully on the hopeless adobe.

III “Dance”

Darkness is drenching the dancehalls with solemn and sacralized sorrows;

tears on the terraces, tears on the windows: the wipers are welcoming

insects on car hoods, if only to crowd out the streaks of the raindrops.

Never the friend and never the lover: they waltz and arrange

themselves with precision that matches their equally careless alignment,

motion in silence, performed for the pleasure of passing acquaintances

conjuring dreams from the whirling cyclones of feet on the dance floor.

Visions of mystic messiahs abound in the heat of the desert.

This is the nature of water: mockery, hatred, and boredom;

with all the loneliness cities and crowds can bestow on horizons,

it stings and slaps at the roofs of the cars and their havens from darkness,

now an assault, but later a stealthy embrace in the starlight

of trembling throats, the typical partners of desiccation.

IV “Dream”

Death is a friend to the cobblestone paths and flickering streetlights,

but here is the home of his brother, the steward of sleepers and settlers.

His conquest of sand had begun in the distant horizons of Dacia;

now he approaches Sandia with reckless attention to detail.

Watch the abodes of the citizens; nothing will change their faithless devotion,

their motionless movement: they balk at the thought of thinking existence

from out of the bloodless marrow of death’s unexalted brother.

Images haunt the potential of sleep’s indecipherable conquest;

Spirits of terrible omens are grasping at withering night-time.

Horrid and choking, the desperate fingers of desert paralysis

slice the intelligence ruling the sky-scape deserted by Serapis,

fingernails tearing the limitless flesh of celestial cortexes.

Now is the hour, and his is the power, the headless energy,

drawn to the desert by dreamers’ undying devotion to darkness;

they worship at altars of plywood and churches of meaningless potholes.

Twilight approaches, twilight approaches, twilight approaches:

the stars and their demon compatriots dance in the waning of wakefulness.

Turning the minds of the dreamers, the fingers of slumber dismantle

the walls of reproachful communion. The minutes become the remaining

shadows of memory. Now it is fading; before it was blanketing

fields of desire with angry and pointed critique of the emptiness.

V “Silence”

Reticent peace is descending upon the mysterious battlefield.

Queen of the cities, the roads here are paved with the gold of divinity,

purple and red, and the people, though fleeing its dreadful majesty,

bow their anointed heads in reverent and Fabian deference.

Roiling waves of the waveless are signs that the curtains are closing,

devotions are ending by conjuring water, the dreamers are painting

the beauty of night in the city with brushes on teeth and icons

of desert saints in the eyes of the restless, the voices of foxes

scampering through the unlivable memories of sunlight and storm clouds.

Visions of mystic messiahs abound in the heat of the desert.

All the machines and the voices of men have been insufficient

to break the interminable quiet that dominates souls in the desert.

These, these useless attempts at describing in words the unthinkable

tensionless peace of this place, are but remnants of silence reified.

Nothing fits less than words to describe these moments of holiness,

sacral sensations amidst a belligerent twilight eternity

BIO: Sam Cavnar-Johnson is a writer, musician, and teacher based out of Columbia County, New York.