Earthbones

The Creation

Let there be emptiness and jaguars, let them seek
each other at the end of night
for that is when the mountains shall be formed
so that they glow
upon the Earth.

There was restlessness inside the world
that struggled to break through the surface.
Floods could not hold it back
and the redwoods and the oaks took up position
determined to grow until
the end of time.

Lost rivers discovered their way
back to the sea, arroyos gained a foothold on
the desert, and the ground kept shifting to accommodate
their movement. When caribou walked
in line across a continent they
believed for all the world
that they were water.

For predators and prey there was a place
where shadows moved and even the winds
sought refuge where
the soul came to seek perfection. Poor soul.

Mountain, tundra, ice cap, every form of stillness
came to be because
of violence in wind and rain and lava flows
for whom the world was not intended to be calm
but beautiful.

When silence prevailed the grass gave thought
to how a rock must feel. The rocks in turn began to wander,
settling in streams and along
trails on desert mountains inviting contemplation.
It was quiet. It was where a rock was happy
just to be a rock, but when storms tore open the sky
thunder’s wish was to be a word.

Three Navajo Views

I
To every rock its own
rough scars, to every cliff its pockmarked face,
and to the roads connecting space
to open space let there
be fence posts wise
enough to guide them to the sun.

II
There’s a dissonant horizon
where the topmost crust of layered earth
touches sky, a long bow
drawn across the sunlight
to help it reach
a note so high the Devil
retunes his violin. Listen: he’s reached his grand cadenza
with two broken strings in the pizzicato
rain that falls in a minor key.

III
Rocks remember everything
historians ignore. And it hurt the trees
to watch. But there is resilience
in earth enough to turn
fire blue.

Anasazi Triptych

Earthbones

It takes a lifetime walking
between the ethnoid bone and the horizon.
Shadows peel away
from time, the sun balances
on the fibula that rests
along the edge of a mesa, and the ribs
of a canyon pull apart

to let migrations through to open land
where vertebrae have risen
through the emptiness
that makes of the ground
a sacred space.

Skyscape

There is a sky that won’t descend from high
in the eternal realm but
grows out from the earth
with its cargo of storms and blades of sunlight.
It mirrors the land

it dominates, pulls thunder out of the infinite nowheres
that float behind the clouds,
and spans

the spaces from ice with no heart
to the midsummer glare
of rocks that think of themselves
as fallen suns.

Shadowland

The Earth’s long cliffs sway in hallucination’s light
where it falls between what belongs to the Earth
and what the sun has claimed
as its own.

At the Desert’s Edge

I
Run, spirit, run; shadows are alive;
three-fifty-one and a Screech owl’s asking questions
of the pre-dawn world. Its notes bounce quickly
on the silence. The miracle will surely come
between hope and melancholy. Desert
thunder, heron passing overhead into the urban
world, to the dark sun
floating on still water.

II
What the hawk sees is
the way sunlight cuts into the earth and how
shadows follow snakes beneath
its skin. He sees a mountain’s wingspan.
He sees an angled change

in the direction an arroyo takes.
Sees it melt into rocks when
there’s nowhere else for it to go and it
just breathes in, breathes out, existing

where all that’s asked of it
is to be in time with the desert’s
slow pulse.

III
The suns of cultures past
are buried here. It is the hour
for the owl to undertake her ghost flight
to become heat’s shadow ascending
into moonlight. Saguaros listen

to the stones exhale
and glow a shade of blue scented with relief
that night has come

with all its ancient silence, broken only
by javelinas trampling stars.

Desert Breaking

The sleeping land awakens
as a trembling underneath pulls rocks
apart and opens up
a space for the emergence
of a formation destined to mark its place
on Earth. Needle, spire,
fire wrapped in shadow, compass for a soul
to find its way toward the sun
and in the seconds
before stillness preserves it for the ages there
is disruption to order, a subterranean
roar, mystery putting on
its eternal disguise.
Such pain the land endures to bring
a sacred form to light.

Origins

Here are clouds tired
of being steam. Fault lines through the ground
that want to bind
elements together. It’s all happening
without a plan, water versus
atmosphere, fire
confronting rain. Light’s pretending
to be snow, and wind
wants nothing but a place to rest.
There will be sunlight pooled
inside a leaf, suns that go calmly behind
a mountain range, hummingbirds
and condors, jaguars in moonlight, iguanas
in rain. And there will
be theories of how it all began,
the mathematics of belief and the longing
for order confronted by chaos
turning into beauty.