The desert tastes yellow

The desert tastesyellow on my tongue

and bitter like herbs in a narrow gorge

where water waits under the rocks

for the next rain in five years

and where fish suffocate

which were born in the mountain streams

but the frogs play their unending pan-flutes

as soon as the moon rises over the blackmountains.

That then is the night: a dark blue ocean

filled with sounds of shifting sands:

Cricket chirping floats on the air

like a hot breath, a song turned to ashes,

vibrating between the white teeth

of springbok skulls, a sigh of the wind.

Here all the roads lead to nowhere inparticular,

they end in a sandy ford of soundless tracks

through the whirlpool of dessicated dreams.

Somewhere under the Southern Cross

you lie on your back and hear

the desert owl hoot its loneliness

across the curve of the canyon.