ARIZONA WINDMILLS The windmills, like great sunflowers of steel, Yellow melon flowers Crawl beneath the withered peach-trees; The houses, doubled-roofed for coolness, A man with jingling spurs Walks heavily out of a vine-bowered doorway, The windmills stare at the sun. The yellow earth cracks and blisters. In the afternoon The wind takes dry waves of heat and tosses them, Mingled with dust, up and down the streets, Against the belfry with its green bells: And, after sunset, when the sky The windmills, like great sunflowers on dried stalks, Stare hard at the sun they cannot follow. Turning, turning, forever turning In the chill night-wind that sweeps over the valley, With the shriek and the clank of the pumps groaning beneath them, And the choking gurgle of tepid water. MEXICAN QUARTER By an alley lined with tumble-down shacks And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering, Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth and dogs Half-naked children are running about, Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, Men slouch sullenly Behind a hedge of cactus, The smell of a dead horse Mingles with the smell of tamales frying. And a girl in a black lace shawl Sits in a rickety chair by the square of an unglazed window, And sees the explosion of the stars Softly poised on a velvet sky. And she is humming to herself: "Stars, if I could reach you, (You are so very clear that it seems as if I could reach you) I would give you all to Madonna's image, On the grey-plastered altar behind the paper flowers, So that Juan would come back to me, And we could live again those lazy burning hours And I would only keep four of you, And those two orange ones yonder, A little further along the street A man sits stringing a brown guitar. The smoke of his cigarette curls round his head, New love is better, the old is turned to hate. Life is forever, youth is for a day. Love again if you may Before the stars are blown out of the sky And the crickets die; Babylon and Samarkand Are mud walls in a waste of sand." RAIN IN THE DESERT The huge red-buttressed mesa over yonder Is merely a far-off temple where the sleepy sun is burning Its altar-fires of pinyon and of toyon for the day. The old priests sleep, white-shrouded, Their pottery whistles lie beside them, the prayer-sticks closely feathered; On every mummied face there glows a smile. The sun is rolling slowly Beneath the sluggish folds of the sky-serpents, Coiling, uncoiling, blue-black, sparked with fires. The old dead priests Feel in the thin dried earth that is heaped about them, And now the showers Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers: CLOUDS ACROSS THE CANYON Shadows of clouds March across the canyon, Over a curtain of flame. Clutching, staggering, upstriking, Darting in blue-black fury, To where pinnacles, green and orange, Await. The winds are battling and striving to break them: Thin lightnings spit and flicker, The peaks seem a dance of scarlet demons Flitting amid the shadows. Grey rain-curtains wave afar off, Wisps of vapour curl and vanish. The sun throws soft shafts of golden light |