The desert is surprising as a tissue sample          
seen under a microscope, all those sunsets.
The ovary slide, the uterus slide.

Headlights, skin, my inadequate openings
are always framing things
out of the picture. The jackrabbits turn

their narrow faces and leap off the road.
In Las Vegas there are no girls
only girls withthe hugest of eyes

and some faces
appear and reappear
behind hot pink phone numbers

on the sidewalk. I am
in the light of the neon, watching
through the watching side

of a two way mirror. Five dollars
gets you one minute to see inside her
the way the microscope would

expose whatever was hidden
if you shut one eye right.
Shut one eye. Sit still. She is all sunsets.

All close-up and postcard and longed-for,
like how the slides are
never believably part of a woman.

__

In college, I went to Red Rocks, Nevada to walk around and not-rock-climb while everyone else rock-climbed. The desert reminded me of space-scapes from Calvin and Hobbes books and of the tissue that my high school anatomy class told me was in my uterus. Las Vegas glowed over the horizon every night. When we finally went, it was full of brides.