There’s a certain kind of darkness the desert has, the kind that seems to rise from the ground itself, latticing its way, muted, through the air, and yet you can still see the knotted limbs of the junipers, and the pock-marked openness, the rock fields and buttes, all of it encased in a muffled kind of brightness, an effect I’ve seen above snow, where the light reflects back strange and silver, the entire world like that except for the highest arch of the sky, which stays porous, and black, like basalt. And here in the desert there is also a point on the horizon, a small dip where the sunset pools, golden, long past dusk, weakening the earliest constellations, bleaching them, until at last that, too, darkens, and I nestle myself into a sandstone divot to watch the stars, feeling the day’s heat leaving the rocks, conducted into my outstretched palms, little by little, until the earth grows cold.