This could be an Old West movie set,
but there’s no celluloid, no film

winding behind a panoramic lens. There’s just us
and a leftover world: empty street, soil
baked and flattened by the sun’s shifting

hum. The horse someone tied up
and forgot, its bony head still bending
toward the coppery dirt. The slate-blue sky.

Your whispers go arroyo and chaparral
and sagebrush and strip mine. Out here,
I breathe whole canyons

and the sunset makes pink ribbons
of the sky. We’ll find a way to get
the town’s parts to work: swing the pasture

gates, the heavy saloon doors
on their brass hinges. This is the empty, the ether,
the in-between, and everyone’s forgotten

how to let things end. The last
tumbleweed will startle as it passes
through town. We’ll choreograph old scenes,

and the ghosts will step close and say,
That’s a beautiful two-step. It’s been so long
since anything here moved on its own.