from All night in the new country
South into the country of lost things
_______________we passed through quiet
villages. The wind sprang up
overnight and some mornings
we awoke as dunes
in a desert of dust. A fine sand blew in
from the north and what of emptied
towns after a year of windstorms:
would the rafters and rooflines
show their spines against
the rising soil? Those years we became
strangers to ourselves and sought the future
in any sign; if the sands
hadn’t overtaken the road
we arrived on by morning,
soon enough the winter rains,
or an army whose trajectory
needed no extant path,
would.