Just off the front porch the sagebrush shakes in the wind. The moon rests like a cold, white stone in a dark river; the constellations are settled on the ink-black sky. A bare light bulb sways behind me in the current of air, throwing my shadow on the desert floor, my shape gliding over the brush and sand, the sandstone boulders obscured by the night.
Heavy clouds move like a herd of horses and shroud the brilliantly lit moon. Mary steps on to the porch, the screen door crashes behind her.
“Storm comin,” she wipes her hands with a rag, “I ain’t leavin the light out again just to get broke.” She unscrews the bulb and is gone from the porch.
The landscape becomes a variegated array of black on pitch black. Suddenly, the sky erupts in sound and light. The landscape is illuminated and the mountain range in the distance is born of lightning. The ridgeline bares itself under the spires of white. Mud spills over the limestone ridges and drenches the powder floor. A torrent of water fills the dry beds and the walls of the gullies break off in chunks to join the silt and rush. The desert is a maelstrom of water, a rage of wind and wet sand.
A tin bucket brims with rainwater at the foot of the wooden porch. The wood is split wide where water has saturated and expanded under the desert sun––microbursts shatter the cracked earth, where the sun flakes the sand, a new map of desolation.
Once, when Mary and I had the horses out, the rain came quickly and pelted our skin. It took the two of us, boots slipping in the thick mud, to get the barn door closed. We laughed and kissed on the old porch, a gale of wind blew my hat high on my head. Then, like tonight, the rain brimmed over the tin pail. She looked over her shoulder at the spilling water.
“When do you think the gathering rain becomes just a bucket of water?”
I looked into the cobalt and vermillion sky, at veins of runoff winding through the valley, “I’d say about the same time the runoff becomes a river.”
