We veered from asphalt
to endure fifteen miles of tooth-rattling washboard
through scattered organ pipe cactus
and jagged road cuts, around hairpin turns.
We arrived at a village
that had escaped the cartographer’s attention.
A few houses roofed with tin,
a cinderblock church
that would never grace a postcard.
Where unpolished stones of the road
met coarse black sand
we parked. A shepherd bitch
dragged her mangled leg
towards a smoldering heap
of tires, chicken bones, diapers, tin foil —
all we smelled was salt,
as if the crashing sun were brined.

The sea was a weather vane,
the chop marching south.
Hundreds of gulls were arrayed,
like a corps de ballet.
They leapfrogged their compatriots,
and resumed their spacing,
always at a respectful distance
from each other and from us.
When there was no more space to land
they lifted off, became
a flock of white caps
ministering to the wind.

In the last of three arroyos
was our destination: a fossil
bed, allegedly world-renowned.
And it might very well
have been all there,
locked in conglomerate,
like the floor at Las Ventanas.

There was next to nothing to take home:
a few shells, a few
cuts from sharp rocks.
The wind picked up
and stirred the dust of the dry riverbed.

A red mule and a gray colt, grazing,
were determined to be afraid of us,
they kept running ahead on the trail —
we could have cared less.

Magnificent Frigate birds
still above the cliffs
as if on wires — Did you say

They could be anything, if
you do not know what they are?

As we neared the car
the gulls, fewer in number, unmoving,
fearless or merely tired;
two decapitated blue fin
— they were not there before —
their heads shared a diadem of ants;
a green pickup with Oregon plates,
the tags long expired;
and young mulatto in fatigues
cradling an M-16
walked towards an idling truck.

Did he have a shit-eating grin?
Or a smile?
                                   Now I can’t be sure.