Our Sad-Eyed Lady of the Llano

When it’s silence you’re looking for,
You must forgive my impulse
To go on like so many geraniums
Blossoming, not knowing how brief
Existence weighs the rock
Of nothingness against them.
With the drought boiling
In central New Mexico
Farmers are digging wells
While chilies wilt on the vine.
It’s the time of summer
When even the reservoir
Dries and you can find cutthroat
Trout dying in muddy corners of earth

Where water once stood.
They’re no good for eating,
And the fat bullfrogs that used to fill
The little marshes inside the Bosque
Never came back after the last time
Men upstream cut the flow to feed
The green lawns of Albuquerque’s
Summer season. Once thing:
I never came back because
I saw a hollow face in every window
Where a matchbook patch of grass
Grew in the adobe suburbs,
Where the so-called kings of golf
Swung at nothing.