The Promise

There is this screen the size of looming clouds
the other side of jungle, close-knit jungle,
in desert where the birds have flown away

indefinitely. The screen is both the promise
of vistas and the vista—floating like
the rainbow covenant a god once made;

and every colour fills the frame, but ground
into a grey-brown haze that mocks the sand
at dusk the way chameleons mimic stone.

Confound your fade to black or white, fine image,
and never resolve. In you I think I see
the deepest shallows we have yet to face.