The speaker insists on belonging to the desert. She says she is made of it, with lizards in her blood and sandstone in her teeth, and she calls herself "the light's daughter" and "a cactus wren." These are bold, almost chanted declarations, repeated to trees, stars, graves and people. But the person she most wants to reach keeps pulling away. He calls her "Girlchild" and says he lives too far out, then claims the desert already has him and writes his name in "deathsongs."
The mood is longing, stubbornness and a quiet kind of grief. She goes on loving until she is "dried to crispy bones," still holding his name between her teeth, which suggests devotion that outlasts her own life. The last line changes the tone. Where he sees the desert as something that swallows him, she says, "I know where the desert sleeps." It sounds like a claim to deeper knowledge and a calm kind of power: she understands the place he fears.