The black cactus effigies seem now like a game,
Red blooms on sticks, chuparosa flags,
The creosote trees forever waving present a new bouquet,
A funerary collection. The hills look like wombs
Or burial mounds, take your pick.
Fragrance abounds in the warm spring breeze,
Not exactly hope, more like remembrance.
The branches have dropped and are scattered in a pattern
That seems deliberate, atop the whisper grass
Speckled with pincushion, meadowfoam, lesser paintbrush.
The bees of knowledge race around the fairy duster
In a constant hum, of the same mind as the wind's benediction,
And the slow glide of cloud shadow across the hillsides
Is no different either than the breeze,
One breath, bestowed for new thinkings.
The rock faces turn away from expressing this,
Though birds emerge from their wiry smoketree mouths
And the bees sound, going to their purple,
And the green life calls from their every closure
And the bitter bush looks down in kindness from their bluffs.
You would never know their meaning with your mind
But you flow like a river through what they tell you,
Of love and its eccentricities of design, the beauties
Of geometries, and all the learning they have come to hold
Camouflaged as a saving grace from us.
In their sharpened points and ancient lines
Are the used-up spears from countless futile wars
They have the mien of having fallen, but staying even so,
As if the experience must be preserved in rough block
For those who cannot be allowed to know.
The teddy bear cholla shine instantly when the sun
Reluctantly appears, while we have barely the patience
To follow the desert verbena that live for today
As they spread across the sand, and give away as well
Their form, instead of what they could become, in our gaping.
We can see how every limb on the creosote shakes and prays,
Which turns the whole thing to a dancing figure
Expressing the wind as a form of art, as we do when
Whatever flame compels us, the red ocotillo on the top of the hill
Or the carpet of popcorn flowers below.
