The rock blocks out the sky
Except for some brown-grey clouds
Hiding the desert blue:
Mountainous craters
Dropped from on high
Like precarious truth
Molten and refusing to yield,
Lichen stained with melting words,
Colors of a distant palate.
The flowers are too purple in their prose.
Bristling on the hillside
In a yellow that used to be the sun
The sage make their way
Vibrant where there should be no life,
Much less that which is seen.
The land folds in,
Water jostles ancient stones,
And grasses everywhere
Go along for the ride of the breeze,
The prime directive of green
Fills each crack.
The valley is shadowed by spring,
As patterns of picked-apart clouds
Having drifted too far from the central rain
Molt on the naked plain
That waits for the flash flood of life
With infinite patience.
There could be flowers from this height,
Such magic in the quiet
For the mind.
Further down, the small white boxes
And pocks of mesquite,
The roads like streams
And the endlessness of turquoise
Haze in the distance,
The hills ahead strafed with yellow,
Like it came from them
As a poem.
In the town
The shrubs are like bone
And pebbles of bloom
Where butterflies waver wildly
In a mad dash to be invisible,
To veil their rainbows
With sacred trajectories
Passing stiff grass
Still clouds
Lost in the sun's insight
While mica light
Charges the sand with galaxies,
The cholla holds source in spikes
Splashed with it
Along the vast horizon of brush,
Red ocotillo in the distance
Like a promised land.
The branches tune their blooms
To the seemingly silent air—
A bee blows by to note there's something there,
The harmony unseen
But felt in the lungs and on the skin;
How insubstantial is
The merely physical.
