Regarding Volcanoes and Scalpels Poem by Pamela Uschuk

Driving across the Rez to home, the shattered
cores of ancient volcanoes accuse distant rain that
evaporates before it can save dry earth. One resembles
a woman head thrown back, wailing down the mute sky.
Where is love and why would he button up his shirt
of gray wind, turn up the sleeves of his solitude,
pull grease through his beautiful braids only to leave?
Her cries vanish like vultures
who snatch beaks full of dead rabbit
scoured by dust and the slow grind of earth
through stars who never forget their names.
In the time it takes to slam the door on heartache,
the woman is calm as a monk, face recued East,
sunblazed, chin lifted, hair cascading sonorous
as a sandstone river or an avalanche stopped
mid-crash all the way down her back. In either case,
she is alone with the weather who fashioned her
from an imagination larger than time, alone, that is, but for
the red-tail hawk circling the crown of her decisions
and four slick-billed ravens ripping
fresh-struck rabbit from berm. Last night
I dreamed of volcanoes, of saving the tribe
as I led children from the crocodile earth, cracking under our feet.
Lava the color of a fiery wound crowned high
above date palms telling the ancient truth
that rattled too high for our broken tympanum to hear.
Driving through mirages spilling their guts across asphalt,
I think of a friend whose violin bursts for love
to save her from her own fists punishing the floor
that betrays her. Fire her grief that consumes
the innocuous arms that would comfort her, consumes furious
air above her fingers that crackle out the prosody of longing
on Isaye's mad chords. The skin of her flexed wrist
fits close over mine. What tempers the scalpel that dissects
its own anguish in desire's fickle lab tray? Nothing
saves me but this highway cut through a desert where old volcanoes
remake themselves according to angles of rainlight and wind,
to sky's blue illusion so wide it might swallow our breath.