Antelope Along Willow Creek

In the canyon along Willow Creek, where I've listened to beavers slap their tails in the purple twilight, where nightbirds and coyotes sing the desert stars alive, I follow antelope downcreek toward Clear Lake.

They don't like the narrowness of the sky. The basalt-rimmed canyon hems them in. They run. They swim the creek. Their nervous movements seem to say: "What a terrible place. We can hardly breathe. And look at the sky, just a scrap of a path above the canyon walls."

Now the antelope race out of the canyon, toward a purple sunset as wide as the curve of the desert, over the free-breathing grasslands around Clear Lake.