ARIZONA

WINDMILLS

The windmills, like great sunflowers of steel,
Lift themselves proudly over the straggling houses;
And at their feet the deep blue-green alfalfa
Cuts the desert like the stroke of a sword.

Yellow melon flowers

Crawl beneath the withered peach-trees;
A date-palm throws its heavy fronds of steel
Against the scoured metallic sky.

The houses, doubled-roofed for coolness,
Cower amid the manzanita scrub.

A man with jingling spurs

Walks heavily out of a vine-bowered doorway,
Mounts his pony, rides away.

The windmills stare at the sun.

The yellow earth cracks and blisters.
Everything is still.

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
Becomes a green and orange fan,

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
Scratching their mangy backs:

Half-naked children are running about,

Women puff cigarettes in black doorways,
Crickets are crying.

Men slouch sullenly
Into the shadows:

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
Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words.

And I would only keep four of you,
Those two blue-white ones overhead,
To hang in my ears;

And those two orange ones yonder,
To fasten on my shoe-buckles."

A little further along the street

A man sits stringing a brown guitar.

The smoke of his cigarette curls round his head,
And he, too, is humming, but other words:
"Think not that at your window I wait;

New love is better, the old is turned to hate.
Fate! Fate! All things pass away;

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,
Above the smell of scorching oozing pinyon,
The acrid smell of rain.

And now the showers

Surround the mesa like a troop of silver dancers:
Shaking their rattles, stamping, chanting, roaring,
Whirling, extinguishing the last red wisp of light.

CLOUDS ACROSS THE CANYON

Shadows of clouds

March across the canyon,
Shadows of blue hands passing

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
Over rose-buttressed palisades.

Now the clouds are a lazy procession;
Blue balloons bobbing solemnly

Over black-dappled walls,

Where rise sharp-fretted, golden-roofed cathedrals Exultantly, and split the sky with light.

John Gould Fletcher