The long expanse of nothing
is partly what makes it everything.
Beyond phone lines and brush,
past the occasional adobe home
and its tiny spattering of lights,
stretch mountains across the horizon,
backlit now with blinding orange,
which mellows soon to a gentle pink
rippling across the underbelly of clouds.
Later these mountains and clouds
turn an identical charcoal blue,
mirror one another as they turn deeper,
almost purple. The last vestiges
of pink edge into the fading skyline
and the land before us goes black,
leaving only skies as wide as the West,
as promising as a lover’s dream,
as memorable as the first time.
—
Scott Wiggerman is the author of two books of poetry, Presence, from Pecan Grove Press, and Vegetables and Other Relationships. A workshop instructor, he also an editor for Dos Gatos Press, publisher of the annual Texas Poetry Calendar, and the recent collection of poetry exercises, Wingbeats. His website is http://swig.tripod.com
200 New Mexico Poems 