The desert
winter sits in grey solitude
as the roadrunner, so quiet, streaks west across the path.
The cactus wren argues with itself.
The dove, paired, flies in steady passion to a further arroyo
that lies deep in a basque of mesquite and ironwood.
Hawk scans from saguaro top.
The rain, slow minded, fills the morning
with a steady song
of coming home.
The green fuse drives the flower.
The patient seed moves beneath the desert skin
where spring will find each rock and shadow,
warm the veins of quartz, the resting lizard.
The desert poppy, so orange, flames beside cholla.
Prickly pear, slow juiced to purple, plumps the quail.
The force that blasts the roots of trees
is my destroyer.
The summer monsoon builds fresh walls of dust
galed across the silent trail of javelina.
Tall trees of rain branch and brush the hills.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
how the cool wind flees eastward as muledeer melt
into the foothills rising toward scowling rock.
The bighorn sheep
are never seen. Footprints only.
And the smell. The smell of life
hidden,
almost discovered.
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
I curve into the stoneshape, the crook
of palo verde branches drooped by bloom and bee
and I am the wind
singing.