Heat does strange things to a landscape, and Dave Bonta's poem begins by letting it. Lizards dance on the sand, the mountains refuse to sit still, and even a tortoise keeps time. Nothing here is really motionless, and by the end the speaker decides he can't be either. The poem moves from watching the desert to joining it, and that turn from observer to participant is its central idea. An inner drought can't be argued away, but it can be answered with movement.
The title, "El Donado Marcos de la Sierra," points to a particular figure. In Spanish a *donado* can be a lay brother attached to a religious community, so the title seems to name someone living apart in the mountains. The poem never explains, and the final "I" may be that figure or the poet speaking through him. Either way, the religious undertone prepares for what follows.
The first stanza is built on verbs: lizards "dance," the sun "climbs," the tortoise "moves." The line break after "the mountains won't" lets them sound stubborn for a moment before "sit still" shows they are restless. Judging by the imagery, this is heat shimmer, with the whole horizon trembling. The tortoise is a small comedy, "toiling as little as he can," yet he still "moves in time with the maguey's / sharp-tongued shadow." The shadow works like the hand of a sundial, and calling it "sharp-tongued" turns the plant's spiked leaves into speech, something between a scolding and a prophecy. Even the laziest creature obeys that clock.
The second stanza strips everything down. "Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky." is four one-syllable nouns, each closed off by a full stop, like an inventory of what is left when the heat burns off everything else. Then comes the abstraction that links them: "The will to circle in the wind." Two restless walkers follow. One is Lucifer, who walks "up / & down in the earth." The phrase seems to echo the Book of Job, and the line break makes the walking go literally up and then down. The other is Coyote, capitalised like a figure from folklore and "always / one meal from the end." Both are wanderers driven by appetite. The will to move, the poem admits, isn't purely innocent, and it is partly hunger.
The third stanza is the hardest and the richest. "Let the fullness without / break the drought within" turns on the word "without," which at the line's end means "outside" but also hints at "lacking." The world's abundance is asked to crack the speaker's emptiness. Then the poem compares this to the way "teeming / prayers & curses" seem "to seed the clouds." The image borrows from cloud seeding, and it puts prayers and curses on equal footing. Both are desperate human noise flung at the sky. The rain that results is imagined as a walker, "stepping out with feet of rain / on a Galilee of air." This recalls Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee, except that here the sea is the sky. It is also the third kind of walking in the poem after Lucifer's and Coyote's, and it is a gift rather than a prowl.
The ending is only two lines: "This very day I too / will begin dancing." The plainness comes as a relief after the dense stanza before it. "Too" puts the speaker alongside the lizards and the tortoise, and "very day" echoes the opening "Day after day," so the poem's routine has finally been broken. Notice the tense, though. He *will begin*, so the rain hasn't come and the drought hasn't lifted. The poem ends on a vow rather than an arrival.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its short, uneven lines and enjambments give it a stop-start, shuffling rhythm, and a few sound-clusters hold it together: "sit still," "tortoise toiling," "sun," "sand," "stone," "sky." The ampersands and the dash add a hand-written informality.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about hope. It mixes biblical images with the sand, maguey and Coyote of a dry country, and it never claims that prayer works. It suggests only that when the sky gives nothing, the body can still start to move, and that this might be a kind of prayer too.