Collaboration: Desert and Dance

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Collaboration: Desert and Dance

 by Melanie Perish

Vigilance is a desert word 

with its dust, with

Angles of stone; 

            white domes rise

Lithe and smooth

as legs and torso,

Legato arms of dancers 

that waist-bend like shale arches. In

Every gust, the stone swirls mauve,

mollusk gray, the iridescent  

Yellow in an albino trout. Color and shape

flash like gesture, their movement –

Open 

as the Mohave drifting,

Falling like red silk 

             across this Valley of                                  

Fire. The desert is

the changer and the changed,

In a dance of elements, of minerals

that offer shades and tints 

Real as the coyote, cactus bloom,

red-tail hawk. Here

Eternity unspools its collateral light

            threads sun with shade, ribbons the white fire of stars.