Every blackened smoke tree
Bearded with thick golden hair,
The rust grass that blows like a whisper
To the purple atmosphere.
The tall yellow flower stares down
The prickly pear, the molting
Mountains, the rainbow skies
Over the pot o gold fields,
Very stern, very dead.
I have left so many lives behind.
I don't recognize who I was.
There is no help for who I am.
The seed I grow could be anyone,
Everyone, whatever is needed
To fold back to the source as a memory,
Of the way I felt by the mimosa tree,
The ponderosa chaparral tones,
The red that remains something more
As it is almost infinitely less.
The mountain cap says "don't mind
The aching beauty of old, piled codes,
There is something that I want to say:
I am whatever father you need, I move only
In your mind, do you see -- it -- crackle?"
Along the burgundy ridge, shadows rest
In looming thoughts, complete with silence
What is already whole, and so realized
In holding such magnificence,
The steady drip of light does all the work
To explicate the contours of a thought
Worth keeping, as it fades away.
We do not have such thoughts, except in
Our highest moments, where nothing
Needs to make sense, the light is enough
And infinity is touched without reaching ...
Only to find the stones hold on, too,
Against the thought, of having to be that idea,
Trying to ply their form as formlessness,
As true identity, finally amassed.
A wise old tree stump is missing an eye
But not much else. These are faces you know,
There is nothing to fear from loved ones,
Despite the scowl and the silence,
The stillness when you move closer
And leaves transform into light on black wicks,
Cactus spikes hold spiderwebs incandescent
As the pines swab with fire the air.
The light is such, the red rocks cool it off
Like blood from the hills to soften the trails,
And indeed there doesn't seem to be a limit
To how deep the redness goes
As the contrast of sky dissolves.
Even what wasn't red before
Becomes so, in sympathy.
It becomes too much, so the sun must, finally,
Take it away, in a blaze of nebular blue,
As if in a final taunt not to touch
Our trusty cameras, but to look, simply
To look, unbearable as it is, to look.
