cxvix.

a hall of rooms, strung
across the valley,
through its sides

sinking under the 
riverbed,
vaulting from the
bedrock, into

boulders, rising into
the sky, buried,
in the flaking sandstone,

falling off
the canyon-sides.

high and silent, over the sage
brush and scrub, 
roofs rising nearly as high

as the cave roof, but the ladders
gone, fallen into
the wash, sticks in the stream-bed
and rivulets--something

happened here, 
flags fly, off a laundry line,
strung between piled rock,

there's a garden in the scree,
light filtering down,
through a gap in the vaulted
rock,

across the carpet
onto the altar,

and a net of passages, beneath the 
valley floor,
let out in places
no one knows all of i,

traveling in the dark,

maybe sometimes in the reeds,
sometimes along the tumbled
rocks, in the stream-bed

ground cracked, and grasses
waving, rippling

up the slopes--far across the dunes
deep in the earth,

with the light coming down in
shafts, or carved into
the mountain side

roofs tumbling down the cliff-face,
plazas squared to stairs,
leading down 

to roofs, 
libraries hidden in the rock-face,
light breaking and falling
into the dark, 

and rising
high under the ground,
above the street,

and somewhere else, terraces
rising and falling, 
across the ridge-line,

cupped by the earth,

yards hanging off a cliff,
roads plunging like rivulets

windows lit and vines
swinging,
in a high valley

towns scrawled and looping
across the foothills, open
bright and lush, green
and shadow

some places didn't need to bury
but could dance with
the rock instead,

sprawling over the ground

someday, us in the deep,
high places will come
out and over

to throw streets and rooms
over the hills,
watch the moon rise
from below