El Dorado Winds

Dancing figures swirl above the sands as the moon winks her silvery eye among the doting clouds. The night is full of Mayan magic. A figure of varying concentric circles is propped evocatively against a Joshua tree, feeling the enticement of his prickly spines.

She remembers leaving footprints on the bank after sitting in the rock spring, basking in golden shafts of sunlight all summer long, watching that man with the hungry eyes. He was looking for gold, yet didn’t consider her offering more than Mexican hospitality.

Family outcast, Esmeralda is the queen of these badlands where only stick cattle grow.
Blowing gusts from America carry songs and messages to her from that Promised Land.
She sleeps atop the very treasures the pale man sacrificed his family to search for.

The south wind is named Mariah; they are lovers in time now. No man understands the comfort that the wastelands offer those that linger in their hidden recesses. No man understands why there was a tornado in Kansas on the day that Judy Garland died.