Friday, November 2, 2018

Return to Whiting Ranch

Spirit will get you at a certain point,
After the desert scents have snaked over dead streams
And the dead trees have been discarded like weapons.
What is it that makes the rustling breeze
Become the rosary squeeze of the divine?
Dry fungi and dead leaves are as pink as the sand.
Where does the desert begin?
Where the stone exposes its nakedness?
Where the cactus rose offers itself to the sun
And the delicate branches wave from far away?

The red of the canyon swallows us 
With its cavernous limbs, and rouges the countryside 
Where the mountains end, in sheer sunlit sides
Where I stare until the God within them appears.
But they stay, in their silence, as bare
As the branches cantankerous in their beds
And the memory of my release from this provisional Eden.
The noises of voices continuous from below cast off
The spirit wind for the peaks of non-existence,
As hordes spread out to cover every toehold in the canyon.

There’s a few moments of silence down the hill,
Where crickets keep time with the wideness of what is,
The stream that carries us without touching,
The sunlit peaks, now so far away, take life
Only from below.