Desert Baroque
While sleeping in their cells
the Fathers threw off the sheets
to roll from dream to dream
with transatlantic salt gleaming
on their unwashed skins
and their faith preserved in the frost
of the other world.
They pledged their skulls to this land
with tranquility in its thorns,
redesigned the sky
to accommodate a god
who spoke to them in Latin
and hung bells to give the wind
a Latin voice, but it licked the metal
and carried a bitter taste
into canyons too deep
to convert. They built shadows
with mud, carved them
for birds to nest in the scrolls
they engraved in the clouds
into which they disappeared
at the end of the looping script
in their letters, subsequently rolled
to resemble their bones
and carried away on a tired horse.
David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.