Two by Amy Billone


Death Valley

It never rains here, you say.  But water 

is blinding; between rock sliding cliffs
stones spring past our windshield.

I want to wreck our car, to drown.

This isn’t sea level; it’s Panamint,
you say.  Further down.

My hand out the window turns warm and dry.
Lightning leaps behind huge mountains.

From Badwater, the lowest point 

in the Western Hemisphere, to the top
of Telescope Peak, stretch eleven thousand feet. 

In the darkness, you touch Trumpet shrubs 

and carcasses of shrubs—Bones
overturned, thrown.

Animals here are nocturnal;
they don’t drink at all.

Subdued now, dreading now.

Let’s leave, I say.  But you bend over
uprooted arms curved over heads,

bodies tossed, and hot, tipping half lives. 
Water vanishes in the air like smoke.  

 Time to go, you finally say.

But I keep waiting, my face poised,
motionless, above the ground. 
 
So tired.  So light.

 *********************************************

In this Age of War



With what shrieking hysteria we fly

                 to eyelash thin telephone wires where we 

                                 crouch frightened close together.  Now every

                                              spoken word trips between our listening hands

                                                         and feet.  Now dead people’s voices shudder 

                                                                   inside our grasping fingers, toes.  Clutch them, 

                                                                   we clutch them, swing we swing; our eyes seal tight

                                                          with longing.  Who knows the answers to our 

                                                questions?  Sunlight leaks into growing seas

                                  and fallen leaves from assaulted trees hide

                  the dreamlike all-protecting garden doors

we would give anything to fit inside.