Walking changes as dusk starts to gather.
We’re not able or sure anymore.
We don’t know the path–and if we did know it,

we wouldn’t go on.  We’re afraid of the dark
lowering its heavy, long familiarity
down on the grass.   We’re afraid of the night,

moonless, desert, California,
making us stumble.  We shouldn’t be lost,
out here like demons just at the border

that touches us solid, as if we were gone.
She’s leading me on a path as narrow
as sisters can share.  We pound back down the mesa.

Each of our feet finds its own way, delving
into the gulley whose trees never answer
until, with steps slapping soft as bandits,

I slow on the path, imagining horses.

Stretching necks right out of the stones,
out of the dusk where dark has achieved our
bodies, drawn by the strides that my sister

takes like a rider, Zaraf’s Star,
Fashad, Kashmir, Arabian horses
raise her up with motionless shadow

so she can ride (like a rider, she walks),
cantering, encompassing the pace of the mountain.
Out in a landscape to curl or be curled in,

hunched like riders or curling like rides
under the fairy-tale oaks of the mesa
that hide sleeping children or horses inside,

we talk about horses like hers who run carefully,
with thinner ankles, and mustangs who, fast,
wild grown, wild on the path to blackness,
hunger like stars reaching down for dark leaves.