Sunday, March 14, 2021

Spring’s Opening Move

Palm Canyon, Anza Borrego

The purr of desert lavender –
This spring will feature purple
In the permanence of blue.

The earth spits out its umbers,
As life that’s still,
And life that moves:

The rocks roll with the tongue
Of the wash, as water
Rushes them to sound,

Datura, desert daffodil,
Each one is a city, with a center
Deep inside a quarry of light

That pulses parts of stars
Like humans walk with minerals
Within their blood.

Tiny buds of grass are no more relevant
Than the thinned and brittle limbs
That seem forever gone

But like the iridescent stones
Are only resting
In the whole

With its circuits of flight, like the wind,
Spiraling around each contained
And uncontainable thing:

The thorns in intricate webs,
The twin flame brittle bushes,
The perfect circles where the chia has spread.

The patterns tend to be unique,
For beauty’s sake, perfection’s need,
But they are patterns nonetheless,

Like those lavender bees  
That traffic the freeways
Between exit blooms

And the angles of escape
From each shadow nest
Across crisp, inhospitable sand.

The grass buds are so large
Next to the ants,
As the outcroppings ahead are

Impossible for me to comprehend
Despite their blood-red stains
And knife-blade tips.

You’d think I’d recognize them,
As you’d think the thin red blossoms
On what appear to be dead sticks

Wouldn’t take me aback,
But there you have it,
Even the familiar is strange,

The way that change
Reveals itself
Like a play

In my own attention span
As in the movement
Of rocks and kingdoms.

So much has changed,
But nothing seems different
In the face of this year’s flowers.

The water has come to loosen
The mica shine and divination bricks
I must find knowing in.

The dirt itself is glazed
With universal light,
As I will localize

The non-local intelligence
Beyond my grasp
Or at least my grasping.

The lavender waves
To break the stillness,
The rock pile and its nerves

Are deep in thought,
Bees humming
A drone accompaniment,

Then the crackle back and forth
Of birds, sensing out the depths
That always ripple.

They escape from tree to tree
To demonstrate some freedom
To me, that feels like

A letting go
Of everything
I see and stupidly become:

The ironwood in the sun,
The potential front-yard stone,
Red as the leaves

Of the high plain ocotillo
In bloom, that a few
Drops of water have turned green …

Oh emptiness,
The promised land
That’s in between.