Where the Agave Blooms

One word,

and the dead man is walking

across the hungry valley

toward the three-eyed priestess

and her beastly unkindness.

“Let me rest,” he groans

as he is pecked scarlet,

bone by bone,

seams unraveled so

she can test his fortitude.

“I promised you,”

she remembers, weighing

his long departed heart

against the filmy horizon,

the same obsession

seeping from it

after all these years.

“Peace was never

in your cards, gunslinger.”

Sky reapers, the shadow

of black birds swallows

confused vultures

trailing him from westward.

Somehow, he recounts

the cool sting of aloe

slathered on sunburn,

and visions

of all he could have been

haunts him

even beyond the grave—

friend, companion, father.

“Trace.”

One word

—the name poured

from cursing lips,

and the dead man

is reborn with a new passion.

“Find her,” she demands,

boreing his weathered chest

with a mangled tusk,

once belonging to someone

feral, and reuniting

his still-beating

heart to its birthplace.

“Why?” he questions

while Priestess plucks

her eye from the socket

and fastens it

between his brows

with ribbons of snake skin.

“Death threats, revenants.

She needs you now

more than ever.”

Suddenly,

nothing else matters

but the daughterly

who is, to this day, wielding

the blade he gifted

where the agave blooms.

She wasted

her everything on a fool

consumed by his creed.

Did she try to

trace his face in the soil

after his passing?

How many times, he wondered,

had she beseeched

some godly power

to bring him home?

Was this her doing?

“Who summoned you?”

he calls to

the creaturely woman,

squinting at the

washed-out horizon.

“The unkindness.”

She raises a rawboned

limb to the murky sky.

“Did you know

they have a mind

of their own?”

As if invested

only in his awakening,

devoted to her own order,

her ancient form

is finally freed

by skyfall and returns,

ashes to the sand.

He does not mourn

her absence;

She will surface again

in dreams feigning

memories and remind him

that his soul

is still indebted

to the ravens.

Heart full

of what should have been,

third eye gaping,

he is walking again

across the stormy valley

toward the cowgirl,

knife wielder,

gardener who

craves belonging.

***

Other poems in this collection:

"Westward"

"The Leopard, Boar, and Their Unkindness"