“Each ray of sunshine is eight minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December
night. “So when one looks at the sky, one sees
the past?” “Yes, Yes,” he said, “especially
on a clear day.” On January 19,
1987, as I very
early in the morning drove my sister
to Tucson International, suddenly
on Alvernon and 22nd Street
the sliding doors of the fog were opened,
and the snow, which had fallen all night, now
sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened
out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,
its mineral-hard colors extinguished,
wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.
* * *
The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:
The syrup from which sacred wine is made
is extracted from the saguaros each
summer. The Papagos place it in jars,
Coffee and Irony 