Paintings/Poems

The Afterstorm

 

                 . . . after which, the trees sing

life back into birds, red earth runs

down from and water runs back to

the clouds. Oak speaks to sycamore and

madrone to the pines,

a Black witch moth informs the deer

the forest has awakened.

An alligator juniper

 

that drank a streak of lightning

stands its ground

with scars to show while light

steams from the rattlesnake grass.

Flash, flash, the rocks

 

gave up their secrets, the creek had wings

and Turkey vultures gathered

to an early roost. They’re resting now

with stillness shining on

their feathers, each of them secure

 

in knowing it was just

black daylight passing through.

Desert After Rain

 

Woodpecker tap against sunlight, the latest

sky news on a greening

desert day with chaos settling down

pretending to be harmony

 

while the wrens and hummingbirds

can’t tell why the mountain

doesn’t fly, just spread its wings and display

the purple gorget.

 

Sun Rising

 

Slow light on the awakening road, a thrasher

calling up the sun, the sky breathes in, breathes

out, a dream floats away

without knowing how it ends. Desert red,

 

a world apart. No interest rates, no headlines, just

a jackrabbit who listens

to the stones whispering. It’s too early

 

for suffering to begin

or souls to rise

in protest. It’s beautiful to see

the ancient sun the people here before

 

worshipped as it rose

and whit-whit now the mountain

 

holds its heart up for all the world to see.

Night’s Back Yard

 

A small moth grey

and leaf shaped with a proboscis long

enough to reach inside moonlight

alights on the scars of lightning that remember

days gone by. A coyote shifts

a metal strut aside

to ease himself across the wall

and investigate space that belongs

to his once-upon native land. Listen:

a dark blue call turns shadow

and dusts the stars from

its predatory wings.

Earthly Fire

 

The fire in a mountain’s core

is where time goes to thaw. There’s no way back

from snowmelt, no retrieving

light that turned to smoke.

A million years of darkness burns away,

mammoth bones to dust, no language

to record the years

but javelina tracks. And light

as a coyote come raindrops

on the slopes while

flames speak to each other about

magma’s first ambition; now

the fire wants nothing but

to be a sun.

Time Lapse

 

There is a wind that never sleeps,

brings back journeys, suns

and moons and night trains, dawn flights, blue

snow, meadows

 

floating high above the world.

Here comes an echo

searching for its origins, here the fragments

 

that gave up being whole, a return ticket

to sunlight. It’s desert

as a memory where now lasts for years

and granite

 

remembers the million dawns that warmed it

into being a mountain.