Three people come where no people belong any more.

They are a woman who would be young

And good-looking if these now seemed

Real qualities, a child with yellow hair, a man

Hardened in desperate humanity. But here are only

Dry cistern, adobe flaking, a lizard. And now this

Disagreeable feeling that they were summoned. Sun

On the corrugated roof is a horse treading,

A horse with wide wings and heavy hoofs. The lizard

Is splayed head down on the wall, pulsing. They do not

Bother to lift their binoculars to the shimmering distance.

From this dead center the desert spirals away,

Traveling outward and inward, pulsing. Summoned

From half across the world, from snow and rock,

From chaos, they arrived a moment ago, they thought,

In perfect fortuity. There is a presence emerging here in

Sun dance and clicking metal, where the lizard blinks

With eyes whetted for extinction; then swirling

Outward again, outward and upward through the sky’s

White-hot funnel. Again and again among the dry

Wailing voices of displaced Yankee ghosts

This ranch is abandoned to terror and the sublime.

The man turns to the woman and child. He has never

Said what he meant. They give him

The steady cool mercy of their unreproachful eyes.