When the snow lies like a second skin and the box elder and the cottonwood hang low beneath this slippered desert moon, then frost and sky are two opposing mirrors. When my tooth-long shadow ripples dune and striated, sleeping rock, the sky seems troubled too; no comet stirs the clouds, and the burn brighter than the fossil streams frozen upon these striped-rock walls like tears.

The desert is a land I have long-cherished. Rippling in the heat as in the cold, choking breath beneath its winding sands, it is the natural home for such a one as He who carries bones upon his back, souls within his weather-tattered coat. Beneath his little bud of moon and all these scattered stars, I could forget myself. I could walk across these sleeping sands and brush my sulfrous metacarpals through the bearded rabbit brush yellow on yellow ‘til icicles ring a frightened Dies Irae. I remember now a distant memory; a young man running through the snow, cold needling his puckered heels ‘til he collapsed for his devouring. I stop my pacing and recall my own demise the first of many where I would preside; the numbing frost, the swirling winds, at last the limbic warmth deep in my cerebellum, twisting like a worm inside a skull.