When the officer asks
Are you a citizen?
the answer isn’t easy
to articulate. It’s been
eleven thousand years since the ice cap
receded for mesquite
to grow here, and six thousand
five hundred later the Organ pipe
appeared. The oldest
mountains have been worn
down to what they are
by sixty million years of weather
while the plates beneath them
shifted. It all
made a place where the Cactus wrens
could nest among thorns
and scrape against silence with their calls.
There’s a green light today
growing out from where the earth cracks.
Every vista here
ends long ago,
too far away
for anyone to call it home.
David Chorlton