Covid-19 as metaphor, mortal, and moral presence informs occasional playful, sometimes paradoxical, but mostly serious, Zen-like gestures and texture in Empty Heaven/Empty Earth by localizing person and place to a specific culture and a specific time. The speaker's ambivalent relationship to this American Southwest borderland and Nature-at-large is epitomized by the Chihuahuan desert's commercialism and eventual urbanization as desert and wildlife are displaced by condo and strip mall, his conflict with aging, mortality, and postmodern identity by confronting past and present ghosts through otherwordly and borderland tropes-"shadows and dreams," "signs and wonders"--among rubble, goathead and sandbur, coyote and corbie, beauty beneath the banality and chaos of overlooked things of this world within the context of the global pandemic.