"That thing that you call `lightning'
                                      is nothing else but a cloud that is white.

The one who is there started there and descended.
Wonder Boy
he carries nothing but a bow, and he has one
                                                            unfeathered arrow to go with it.
Standing there he said, `It is I whose lightning it is.'

Having descended, he says,
                                                   `I will go throughout the length
                                                    of this earth describing things.'
He said it was a song. `I will name it,
                                                    and people will call it lightning.'"

Charles Wilson,
   telling Quechan (Yuma) origin myth

Tuco scanned sky,
moved to cover his bedroll before the rain gathered force.

Lightning spoke,
startled the horse, who stuttered briefly on sudden slick ground,
then drooped to the task of waiting.

Tuco eyed this desert, this old and weary place of Yuman ghosts
that now turned its face up to catch the falling sky.

The lightning spoke, and spoke again,
naming each hill, naming each bush and tree, calling to the hidden rabbit,
the cactus wren and roadrunner, seeking the sidewinder, the scorpion
so that, with the unfeathered arrow, they too may be described;

                                            so that they too may know
that the one who is there
                                                                      started there
                                                                                                  and descended.