Janus

You know how it is. You see an image,
maybe two saguaro catci leaning
toward each other, friendly, framing
a low orange sun. Automatically
you think “here is the southwest” because of
Arizona, state of the arid zone,
because the sun sinks just past it, nightly,
past the Golden Gate, into the sea.
Yet, can we ever be sure of what we see?
The sun could easily be just rising,
an objective camera pointing east.
All we can know, certainly,
is that truth travels like the sun
and so, it seems, do we.

Leslie Schultz

(This poem is inspired by a book called The Sky Islands of Southeast Arizona by Kate Crowley and Mike Link (Voyaguer Press; Stillwater, MN; 1989)