On Those Nights When Even Your Fingers Ache With Emptiness

Insist on existence.

When the desert air turns desperate and transparent,

I lie in bed and tell myself:

You are a tree. Your ancient dark trunk sturdy, unchanging, while your leaves yellow and age.

You must be tenacious — high on a rock wall, wrapping your roots around a small outcropping, tethering the mountains together.

You shelter all things wild and free.

Coyotes, their cries like crescent flames that flick and fade, singeing the silence.

Rabbits that bounce with familiar anxiety. The same gray-black as your half-tabby cat, puffs of tail white and tender as her belly.

A lizard, drowsing in the last sunlight, sopping up every ray of strength.

A world of birds: the owls, their low woo-woos a gentle welcoming of night. The robin, the swallow, the hawk, the dove — others with spotted bodies and songs you have yet to recognize.

All these inside you. Teachers, survivors.

Cacti, standing their ground, the only weapon their spines.

Flowers, bright as life savers, that wriggle and sprout out of rocks and hard places. That insist, unequivocally, on existence.