Ghost route

You tell me that in this part of the country, the cacti are three hundred years old. You tell me they turn to wood and as we climb up the cobbled stairs I marvel at their spikes and spindles, surfaces that are rippling and peeling. One kind of plant morphs into another, green skin striated with brown. This species, you say, adapts to survive in the desert, where it doesn’t rain for months, years, maybe decades. As the rows of adobe houses flicker in the shadow of the Sierra Madres and the orb of the sun dips into the valley around us and the wagons that hauled silver between the old world and new trace their ghost route on the camino you drove to get us here, time freezes. It hangs in the dusk. The new leaves have already transformed, before we can notice, into bark.