Hawk
Hawk
Contents:
I The Inner Life of Landscape The Inner Life of Landscape Desert Blue Awakenings Restoration Downslope In Time Winter’s Desert Tracks Across the Sky Run Everyday’s Desert Newstrail Belonging Clear Day Cloudcover
II Hawk Hawk Pyrocephalus rubinus Roadrunning Migration Watch Mockingbird Gila Woodpecker in a Stormy Dusk Coyote Migraciones Night Vision Claw
III Sun Rising Sun Rising Peakline Rocklight Over Silverton Rewriting the Border The Afterstorm World upon World Ahwatukee AM Raptor Now The Storm of August 25th Beth Night’s Music Octavio
IV Summer’s Closet Creation’s Summer Summer Blue Backyard Summer Summer Night Calls Summer Storm Summer’s Closet
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I The Inner Life of Landscape
The Inner Life of Landscape
No rest along the ridgeline. A thought can float to where the sky begins and disappear. No problem, it’s life in mountain time, passing slowly rock by rock and even slower deep inside where not even the coyotes see what’s going on. An upward thrust, heat flowing in the dark, some stress and pressure and soon it is a moodswing turned to stone.
A snake at rest undreams the image of the rocky face that casts a shadow over him. Light cannot hear the whiplash moment of a bite, the way in greener landscapes grass cannot hear the quaking underneath it.
Hawks afloat on thermals, sunlight seeking refuge in arroyos. The surface is so alive imagination can’t reach the geological salad inside Earth.
Desert wide the only symmetry is a pair of ravens as they interrupt their ground search with the dip and rise of pleasure on the wing while they shine above a mountain that eats time. Holds its ground, welcomes Rock wrens home, shoulders stars at midnight, and shelters underneath an owl’s wing. Waits patiently for one good storm to wash a year of suffering away.
Weather’s only skin deep, come wind, come lightning, flash flood on the run, water singing to cure the headache in the lithosphere.
The interior’s exchange rate is a cubic yard of darkness for a cubic yard of light. It’s quiet enough there for stones to think. Some ache when memories possess them, others smile at having been released from a world of lies and all of them learn there’s no way back from being a dream.
Desert Blue
Thirsty light on a trail through foothills that can’t sleep. An owl coughs fur and bones out from a mesquite branch, the pulse rate of the desert slows.
The stones in an arroyo wake up to better see what treads on them: a lost soul seeking refuge or a palo verde tired of being rooted down and trailing its roots behind as it goes wandering.
A star on every cactus thorn and a coyote running with the moon between his teeth.
Blue memory, each step a guess in the dark. Two o’clock can’t see where one o’clock has been. Which way to rain? No difference to the sky between thunder and a prayer.
Awakenings
Dark north, dark east, a Great-horned owl shakes loose the sky from underneath her wing. A rustling on the ground between lantana and the bush with small blue flowers, a low hum in the distance from roads that never sleep and a thread of dark silence running down the wash from recent rains still searching for a way into the earth. A fire in the core is where time goes to thaw. There’s no way back from a million years of darkness burnt away, mammoth bones to dust, no language to record the years but first light on the surface while flames speak to each other about magma’s first ambition; today the fire wants nothing but to be a sun. Haze across the four peaks and a blue that shines down on the desert mountain where all trails lead to sky. There’s a buzz in the light that flows across the boulders where wrens are and moisture on the branches running green along the bed of an arroyo freshly stirring itself awake. Bees clinging to a shadow, urban streets below lying at rest from fitful dreams, kestrel setting shivers free and watching from a mesquite bough. A warbler at the window, thrashers on the grass, no distance between domestic and the wild when night has left a fingerprint on the backyard wall, a metal strut moved aside for a coyote to ease himself across and investigate space that once was in his native land. There’s past where the present ought to be. It happens without notice, something quiet wakes up and wipes the history from its eyes. Rock formations awaken bearing scars of lightning, and memories return as the moth does who rests on tree bark still wearing last night’s moonlight.
Restoration
Silent as a raven’s shadow over aching rocks the season’s heat clears every day a space where it rests until the sky can breathe. Mouse bones rest next to javelina tracks that point downslope while the deep earth listens to the surface and hears nothing but the steady drip of starlight into dust. Night, day, to the sun they’re just the land opening and closing its eyes, just thirst talking to itself the way lost travelers do. There’s tightening in saguaros’ core, tree roots breaking ground and ground flowing up and over inclines, down arroyo beds to where a stone becomes a sigh. To anyone not desert there’s an air of desolation in mesquites straining where they stand but it’s waiting that holds on to a place within the universe where drought and resurrection exist until the rains arrive to conjoin them. Comes a time earth feels what palos verdes do when it becomes so dry that silence crunches underfoot. Then lightning comes to save what can be saved at summer’s end, with moths exploring new growth as flash floods bring the desert to life and coyotes are back to their nights licking salt from the moon.
Downslope
The dip and pull by which forces underground draw rock, mesquite and gravel trails down make imbalance of the mountain as it leans against November light. So rough and nothing stands except by virtue of the weight it stands against, textures flow into each other and dissolve, arroyos take direction from the clouds. All a kind of sacred chaos these formations and the creases in between. Turn and rise, decay, take root, live as often as the rain allows. Follow any crooked route from sky to earth and down from where the boulders are embedded in deep time on land with nothing to be but itself. A hawk passes through the sun with eyesight that reveals the inner life of everything in the wide unplanned below with every stone finding a place at journey’s end to be heat, to be lightning, to be among the weights that hold desert to the Earth.
In Time
The Earth didn’t know when it buckled it would mountain its way toward sky
and press against emptiness till light and darkness tumbled down together
to be desert. Where sunlight leaves fresh tracks at every passing, where
nights are dry whispers that guide a Great-horned owl to prey
and scorpions have a compass needle at the tip of the their tails. It points
to where any given trail disappears. A bend, a twist, the ground
can’t feel the steps of a coyote touching lighter than moonlight on ripples
in the desert’s skin. Trails of sand and shadow, space to be alone in
and alive. Seasons climb a rock face, come back down an incline
between palos verdes and creosote bushes that feign their expiration
but green into the after rain. Run, Jackrabbit run, there’s lightning
on your tail. Monsoon come, monsoon go, the rocks endure it all, they’ve been
here since the underworld broke free, they know
that fire is only time that’s grown impatient.
Winter’s Desert
Winter light so sharp the ridge could slice open the sky to release the mysteries beyond it, let them fall down onto Earth and tell what desert’s made of. Unquiet energy become dry land and heat, a rain shower once a year, the nightly passing of coyote souls in blue darkness, and on the shortest day a chill that punctures air with thorns. A Turkey vulture drags his shadow down, across the shining ground and back up to the height from which he sees creation’s violence calmed into arroyos. A thousand years to shift some stones downward, a thousand more for them to settle and every monsoon’s final gesture the teacupful of wind that whistles for cool weather to begin. Ice on the horizon, flock of sparrows busying mesquite and tracks left behind by the stars. Mockingbird, thrasher, echo that can’t find the way to the call it once was. No records ever kept of how nascent fires burned down to the glow of late afternoons on a mountain shedding light just enough
to fill the skin a rattlesnake no longer needs.
Tracks Across the Sky
Javelina crunching stars, jackrabbits with ears to receive the music of the universe while coyotes stir moonlight into blue air with their tails. There is a deadly beauty to the hour. So softly sheathed are talons of the owl and when a bobcat springs from rock his muscles flow beneath the skin as easily as a blessing that flies above hunger and lies. No way out from an arroyo when prints run on sand and gravel and along a passing cloud. And when the night goes back inside those cavities within a desert canyon left behind are tracks that follow tracks on land and on the atmosphere beyond knowledge, where predators see in darkness and a raccoon is so curious to know what it hides he leaves imprints of his fingers where he tried to scratch it open.
Run
His scrambling sets the angled bank to an arroyo crumbling downslope into earth when a jackrabbit makes stones come suddenly alive. A mesquite steps aside so he can pass from desert into sky, from where he looks down at an unexpected sound. Bright morning, coyotes back in shadows, sleeping as only fur can. It’s a reflex leap from creosote to the portals of light and a space open to receive information that has travelled through the universe to reach the startled ears that hear even sunlight as it touches the ground. Up from the gravel bed, stopping to assess the quicker way to disappear, he’s a memory before ever being seen. There is no history to slow him down, a clear path in all directions. One runs low and out of sight, one high among the stars, and one ends where the sun is black. So run, spirit run, don’t stop to ask the way; become earth, wind and fire, nobody’s father, nobody’s son.
Everyday’s Desert
First breath, the morning moon rides bareback on the mountain. Darkness shades to thrashers’ voices, the gravel tracks soak back the animals who made them. Coyote sharp, the stones are shifting to make space for light and anyone who needs to be alone today. So familiar the trail as to rest beneath the rocks, above the creosote, straight along the border between waking life and sleep. The far off peaks are blue, cloudstrings at the altitude at which stone dreams there’s a forest growing to be closer to the sky, and here underfoot shoes crunch their way to be more part of Earth. Brittlebush upslope, bright yellow, olive green, no clock to time when spring arrives. Along a single thread of trail a Roadrunner hurries, light into shade, and the shade disappears in a hollow. Where the trail stops to look up Rock wrens call high and low, give voice to formations assembled through chance. Everything else has fallen into place: mesquite, arroyos, yesterday, the years preceding it, and all the storms the ground has ever swallowed. Now from overhead ravens caw down to say it’s good where they are, it’s desert even in the air.
Newstrail
Javelina starlight on a gravel trail, here’s the way they carry news down from where desert dreams to darkness parting on the lower slopes. On scented nights there is a path to follow lined with ants and prickly pear, the way down being easy to the hoof when the land rolls gently underneath each step. So peacefully the rocks rest in positions they have been assigned. The earth lies back with one eye open. Soft clouds overhead, sharp moon, noses to the stony way from higher ground to low, bearing an account of how tranquil the world could have been. It’s the hour negotiations are on hold, convenience stores that stay open twenty-four hours to service a nervous city glow from their chilly cold case hearts, the word progress lies awake and imagines it could mean improvement. Slowly, slowly, bite into a cactus pad, chew thorns, body weight and light of step, become witnesses without the words to tell what witness sees.
Belonging
Wings locked for pace, a hawk glides through the cloudy light and wheels around, back high enough to view the dry, the cracked, the wrinkled desert whose rocks tumble until they have no energy to continue and stop to wait for brittlebush to yellow in between them. The ground here swallows time. Run, shadow, run, burrow down into the past, leave a trail of silence for the animals to follow. Sun balanced on a fingertip, directions converge, one god and many beetles, or one beetle which history will make a god. All the same to the hawk, javelina, or the soul wandering in search of a body to guide it home. Let it find where it belongs; a narrow cave vacated by coyotes or a crevice on the slope from which all tracks are visible, even those raccoons leave on their way down from the stars.
Clear Day
Sunday blue from Four Peaks south, shadows soak into the mountain and late sunlight clings to outward reaching slopes. One step for javelinas, one for the raccoon and it’s time to pack the view away, turn back with one more pocketful of truth, with thanks to the arroyo, the easy way the mountain leans on five o’clock preparing for the night to awaken. There’s quiet justice in the rise and fall of the terrain, cavities to sleep and hide in, narrow space for rain to run and open space for hawks to fly above. No deception to be seen for miles. A dollar here can’t buy a gust of wind. It’s honest land. When an owl or coyote makes a kill the rocks don’t feel a thing.
Cloudcover
Low hanging doubt at the ridgeline, tectonic pressure ten million years into the earth, but time doesn’t stop to look back at itself. The wrens on the boulders have been there since beetles found their way out from the ground
and desert chose as its day of rest one with mockingbirds singing where the sun should have been. Palo verde limbs fallen but branches still hungry reach through them to be green again. And the saguaro fallen several summers deep starts purpling when javelinas
have eaten through the seasons to expose the core. Cloudcover still uncertain, the layers of desert are stacked between sky and decay. Even the tangled dead roots of mesquite won’t let go of the light.
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II Hawk
Hawk
Hangs on a thread from the sun. Watches from the height of solitude what happens among the shifting continents. Devours distances. Weaves a windgust into a nest. Rides the heat. Turns grace into mythology and cleans the flesh from its every bone.
A wing peels away from the sky, the wheel of light turns until being snagged by a claw hanging loose in the air. The circling eye lasers down. Ground on the run, sunlight chasing, the moment it touches asphalt the shadow breaks apart.
From where the doves can’t see and the thrashers can’t hear the grip loosens on a branch at the sudden breaking of ghost-breath through scattering daylight.
It’s peaceful on the thermals, holding by a wingtip to the light. No left, right, east or west this high only watch and wait and watch until the far below offers up a movement for the taking, then it all occurs so quickly the air never knows what cut it open.
The ground doesn’t see the descent; it happens on any still day that horizons are swept together by the outspread primaries and there’s nowhere to hide between the tertials and the coverts. A dizziness, no gravity, a ravenous cloud.
Earth-heavy stillness, desert stares into the openness above, in the space between night and awareness a small patch of fur runs and digs when the moment iscaught on a claw and all that remains is feathered light.
An updraught of vision, the sweep of passing warmth, fast doesn’t outrun beauty when the wings are wide and the descent is graceful. Nothing is ever wasted bone for bone until inside the stomach’s darkness the prey’s last breath is ground so fine it shines.
After each passing the air flows back into the shape it was before. Pale silence. Hidden speed. So relaxed the sunlight looks away to let him through.
Pyrocephalus rubinus
Stinkweed, Mallow, Brittlebush, a single unplanned Sunflower smiling from among the weeds that populate the wash that’s dry and only pretty to the Mockingbirds who sing warmth back into the air. A day worth speaking for as ordinary as the Mourning doves and sparrows busy with the sandy ground in all their feathered modesty. And the entire planet is spinning underfoot, eight hundred miles an hour the park is moving, carrying all who walk there, or throw balls for a dog. All the years packed deep inside the nearby desert lie unevenly at rest the way millennia of chaos had them become. An earthtones day; grass and topsoil, rock and mesquite, the mountain with its buried thoughts insists on staying where it stands. There’s trouble somewhere taking the back roads, smoke rising to the east and the usual battering of opinion against opinion from coast to speeding coast. Nothing much unusual. No TV cameras filming here. No arrests. And just for those who take the time to look a tiny bird whose plumage is a drop of fire among the mesquite branches.
Roadrunning
Night light silvers itself away; the mountain is awake now and listening to the Cactus wrens call to warn the sunlight there are shadows on the run and nobody is safe in spring. Roadrunners move with a subversive grace well suited to the age. Stillness overhead. The ground nervous. Stones stand back to clear a space for passing through.
Scales flaking from the morning sky, jeweled blue and copper green, cholla bright with a crested breeze and tail held straight for balance along the edge between gravity and flight.
The desert opens with groundlight breaking through layers of indecision, clouds snagging on a windgust, midsummer digging into an arroyo, monsoon rains making light of earth packed tight. And there’s always the fine print left by javelinas on gravel trails leading only the moon knows where. When the morning smells of heat to come there will be warm blood, cold blood, shadows running over rocks that never bleed.
More ways to fly than flying: break from stillness suddenly and arrow into shade intent on taking what is there. Or lean a long way forward, gazing hard into a future waiting to shed its skin and be history.
Migration Watch
Another fine morning in our city of weather with no seasons; clear skies
and distant war while citrus blossoms sweeten the sting of rising prices due
to overseas hostility. Spring’s first oriole in the back yard, sunlight sliding down
the desert mountain slope, the long term forecast
is for guesswork with a shower of passwords, digital codes and the continuing
quest for life’s meaning. Log on to the day, seven characters away
being sure to include one upper case one number and a hieroglyph or letter
from an ancient alphabet. The sun the Anasazi knew is climbing toward noon;
will it recognize the here below? It’s the Hooded, orange-yellow, black white
wings, a day out from Mexico and drinking from a shallow bowl on its way
through a world gone out of tune, where darkness hosts the flight of millions
and here the mockingbirds sing all night long.
Mockingbird
The silver-throated bird who cannot sleep imitates the sound
dreams make when they float on darkness. It passes down the street
where windows are left open for the season’s scents to drift
inside. One tune becomes another while the midnight presses roll
with next day’s headlines. Questions daylight cannot answer
roost in trees, convenience store cold cases hum to themselves and
driverless cars go wandering with no destination. Bright moon, insomnia,
a radio playing another country’s music and an intravenous drip of starlight
sky to Earth sustaining the vital signs of mystery.
Gila Woodpecker in a Stormy Dusk
Dark hearted clouds on the mountain, a woodpecker clings to the sky with a claw while the crest on his head sparks red against grey. He comes down to tap tap on the side of the house asking woodwork to remember when it was so many trees. There’s thunder in Heaven, he’s looking to perch on lightning. Soft light, gray light, black light, and a dip in flight as he follows the mysteries back to the light of creation. Does he dream? Does he sleep among stars? He’ll be back climbing tree bark at dawn to ask whether insects have souls.
Coyote
Midnight at the back wall where the metal railing yawns to let him through. City closed down so that darkness can move unimpeded between whatever is legal and what only a coyote will do. He’s dusted with desert and shining with stars at the tip of his tail. There’s not a locked gate he can’t dream open.
Permission neither given nor ever asked for in his world; what’s there is for the taking. Up and over, down to slide beneath, from present to invisible and ever on alert the way of an idea that’s trying to get back into the mind that thought it.
He moves between moonlight and guesswork without ever being familiar yet more memory than fact, casual in a discontented year and slender enough to slip through time.
Inquisitive at twilight he brings some desert to the darkening street. Full moon: to him it’s just another call that rose until it froze to the sky
and come the hours that nothing moves except the owls there’ll be a howl with a serrated edge to part the silence from the peace.
Migraciones
Music in flight from the border tonight and it’s pulling miles of starlight behind it. Darkness tuned to grosbeaks, orioles, homesick songs and the Black-necked stilts who come down at the golf course pond. There’s an echo to the ads between corridos and the high romance that ends in a flourish no matter who stays and who leaves. The trogons cross to occupy a canyon lined with pine-oak where sycamores sing to the daylight. Gray hawks in the cottonwoods, tanagers where the edge of woodland overlooks a wide and open valley dark priests occupied before they named the land for saints, and Black hawks looking down on it from an indifferent sky. Doves take back their city for the summer in tune with the natural order of hunger and survival. 103.5, La Tricolor, playing until morning and then in the yard, russet crest and greyly greened, the unmistakable Trepador cola verde.
Night Vision
Quietly the waking stones begin to move downslope. The decaying thread in a fallen saguaro’s core vibrates. An owl coughs out the final bones of daylight and folds another soul beneath her wing. Her work goes on,
remembrance and comfort mixed with the sudden flexing of a claw. Hers is the ghost flight ferrying between what’s known and only guessed at. Accountant of the dark AM, she asks what spirits know,
her calls are sound that floats from where she turns her moonface better to see the stars nailing the sky to infinity.
Claw
Earth has not forgotten how she pales with altitude until she’s air. Balance, look down
at disinformation flying and facts that never come to roost. She sees how one street argues with another and traffic lights keep changing their minds
but there’s skywork to be done. It’s the best guess of the wind where she goes and no business of the sun’s where she’s been before
coming down to hold on to a snag with the claw by which she hooked
and raised and dropped a desert mountain into place.
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III Sun Rising
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.
Peakline
There’s a sting in the peak and a smile in the slopes leading up from dawn to the sigh that comes from rocks when they see clouds the color of dove calls. That’s when
daylight soaks easily into roughened surfaces, when the fire in a bobcat’s tooth begins to burn, when a desert mountain is so solidly alive
the stones believe they could fly and hunt stars.
Rocklight
Mountain climbing out of time, desert on the surface, solid darkness underground. There’s a hawk’s eye for a sun here and insect tunnels to the past. Red morning, blue dusk,
lizards’ tongues snagging drops of wind, a hummingbird nests in a raindrop; nothing impossible at midnight
where boulders never speak of what brought them to life and gave them a slope to hold on to. Large rocks hunt the small rocks, survival
by night, and bloodstains on the morning sky.
Over Silverton
Golden wind, silver wind, green lace forest below, water for the sun to drink, rocks alive in flowing grass, river in the sky and summer snow packed in mountain crevices. Red-tail
scanning history, ready to sweep down, hook his portion and go back to living in a cloud. There’s whiskey in the mines, old hymns that never end and can’t get through the church doors. Summer cool, the last breath
of daylight reaches the Animas River and floats into forest so threateningly beautiful even the trains cry out that they are high and lost and long to fly.
Rewriting the Border
It’s doves and thorns and sunsets all the way into night, and blue mountains float away at dusk. The border isn’t what it used to be, no Spanish is the Lovin’ Tongue or Marty Robbins riding out of El Paso. Used to be a line between the cowboy sky and shops whose colors overflow to make tourists feel as happy as they couldn’t be at home. A hawk still hovers with each wing in a different country and ravens cross over with ease when they dip and dive for joy, but there are no visas for the jaguars drawn by the scent of survival. Twenty pesos for a dollar, undocumented sunlight, new lives for old and corridos from the radio playing on an August roof in Phoenix. Taco Tuesday in El Norte, deportation on the menu every day. A flag of wind still flying west of Lukeville, hammer tap in a mechanic’s workshop, trucks with hearts of steel between Brownsville and Tijuana, highway never sleeping, flan for dessert. A family lost and a Rufous-capped warbler in southern Arizona, slow river leading a line of cheap labor to the interstate; wasn’t that a time when water was the passport for anybody carrying their first home in their pockets. Cheap labor on the move, supply and demand, a cupful of rain for a day digging fields. A trogon calling from the oaks and sycamores. Summer is his time before the sky opens; fly south, fly north, never fly at all for fear that dreams come only in translation.
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.
World upon World
There’s an upper world, a lower world, and what’s left in between is what the desert has to occupy. Cycles upon cycles through more years than a mountain can count and the doves still wait for saguaro fruit to ripen. Rock looks on
at birds taking pulp, bats spilling out from the moon doing the same. Day, night, prayers and sacrifice, it all works out the way the heat intends, with hummingbirds as emissaries between what’s known
and what a dream alone reveals. Summer months there is more comfort inside the earth than on it, but no patience like what granite has, standing firm until the monsoon rains. Whatever died comes back to life, water in the deep ground
sings, the coyotes are immortal and never tire of living, never ask which world it is they’re living in.
Ahwatukee AM
The turkey vulture flying low along the street this morning casts a graceful shadow on the asphalt. The light of the world balanced on its wings, a slight dip left, another right, the work of cleaning up has just begun. Sunlight in its feathers, embers
in each eye it moves with such purpose the mountain each day brings to life stands back to give more room. It doesn’t need a password to log in to information posted in the clouds pertaining to souls
the owl coughed up at night. A peaceful time. The heartbeat of high noon is bright and slow, the West is still the West beneath the city’s laws and order. Coyotes
patrolling the sky, a hundred degrees and rising, another day, more hair and bones discarded by the stars.
Raptor Now
Egrets up in the leaves that float above the pond, two Black-necked stilts wheel around them and morning has its finger on the season’s pulse. Here’s a Cooper’s hawk
as sudden as the onset of a memory, and gone as quickly. No high summer roads for him, no switchbacks or nostalgia. He’s easy
on the wing, has eyes for what the moment offers and the grace
to take it cleanly. Nobody hears him coming, he’s made of secrecy and sunlight, appears when least expected as the wolf who came down from the sky.
The Storm of August 25th
Clear sky today, sunlight flowing slowly where yesterday’s dry flood advanced from east to west and left the traffic blind. Pull over,
the alert advised, to the edges of the world. Nothing stops fate when it’s four thousand feet high. It looked yellow, was dirty, and soft like a bear. Yesterday had no five
o’clock. Time was dust. But more to come as wind pulled trees out by their roots and set
the scene for rain that was so happy when it fell it kissed the desert back to life. Quiet now, not even TV’s meteorologist to explain that
it was darkness with a beating heart.
Beth
Cloudlight on the ridgeline, dust yellowing below, blue wind in all directions and a blind spot where the sun should be. It’s been six months
since anybody saw the lady whose mind escaped her when she fell and the turquoise car in her driveway is the only sign of life today. She used to sit
outside and chat, took her dog a block and back, complained a little or a lot – it always was the same – and when she came home from being cared for
turned a monsoon’s shade of mean. Some days another car parks next to hers, some days the silence that surrounds her house cries out for understanding. It must
be comfortable living with air conditioning and cats, window blinds down, listening for
a storm to break and rain to be delivered to her door in cups just large enough for her to stir some thunder in.
Night’s Music
One-twenty-eight AM, the sky can’t sleep, radio tuned to starlight, time to be part desert where music crosses over from a major to a minor key. And it is beautiful to hear the sadness
when an accordion dreams, the sound of distances collapsing into melody that nests in the ear. There’s an electric sparkle
in the dark, language with no passport gaining entry to the night and monsoon weather playing through an echo chamber in the clouds. Ay ay ay, spare a thought
for the rain, for a lost streak of lightning that can’t find the way back home.
Octavio
He’s a thimbleful of jaguar mixed with centuries of housecat. Wears sleep as a disguise suggesting domesticity, but once the clock between his eyes ticks daylight he wants and wants. Sunlight on the mountain,
kibble in his dish, white bread on the table, he’ll eat anybody’s breakfast when the window blinds are raised. Postprandially resting with finches in focus
he adjusts the flow of his spine and leaps to where their feeder hangs on the safer side of glass. Race from wall to wall, complain enough is not enough by chewing magazines as though they grew in jungles and investigate
any open drawer or door to where he’s not allowed. Breakages are part of his identity, the collateral damage of being alive. He must be dreaming when he’s curled into a question mark of fur, must remember
the unrecorded months before unsheathing his claws to snag each passing day as though time were meant to bleed.
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IV Summer’s Closet
Creation’s Summer
Calm skies, sunlight in the pines at the north edge of the park, Roadrunner stopping just so he can start again at the pace of surprise to patrol the stones shaded by mesquites along the wash. How did it all begin? With a flash from stormy nothings or the fabled word whose meaning was beginnings? The lizard next to the lantana looks old enough to know and too preoccupied to care. Such busy shadows out where two fledgling thrashers learn to be themselves and creation placed quail among the sparrows with a hummingbird perched on the minute hand of two PM. Such precision couldn’t come from chance. Study how the verdin weaves a nest, the stealth by which a Cooper’s hawk becomes invisible and the casual demeanor of the coyote who this morning threaded himself through a gap in a fence and colonized the light. Maybe the plan was not to have a plan and let earth, wind and fire argue among themselves until unease and earthquakes had their way and it was called good. Doves holding to an ocotillo branch, Red-tailed hawk holding to the sky, deserts shading into forest, rain on its toes and thunder in the clouds. Too much for one god to consider. And with worlds birthing worlds no end to it. Cold moon, burning stars, thirsty javelina tramping downhill to drink. And what of spirits, were they the reason for us all or just an afterthought to make of night a dark terrain where owls decorate the ground with bones. They mark the way a soul goes when it’s tired and needs another story to explain what binds it to the Earth. Flies for the nighthawks, trees for the fires, deer for the lions, monsoons to quench the thirst that makes the desert shine. It’s dry but beautiful this time of year, ashes on the mountainside at dusk, new flight, old bones and insects for the woodpecker who are nestled so darkly in trees they believe he will never find them.
Summer Blue
Blue Mountains of Mexico will we be always alone, still out there on our own Ian Tyson
There’s so much time inside those mountains they don’t care who comes and goes, who watches from across the border as they shade from daytime into darkness into memories of a snake on the road so narrow one thought can’t pass another; the motherfatherdaughter lost and holding close together for water or directions; the blue on the throat of a hummingbird; the easy way a vulture hangs on a thread from the sun; a deer’s eyes in daylight a fox’s at night on a trail that can’t remember him and the abandoned mineshaft in a pine-oak canyon whose old equipment watches for the Red-faced warbler while a coatimundi is so relaxed the leaves on the bough he’s chosen fall asleep.
Backyard Summer
Lizard scales flake from the sun in July, the flickers drill down
into patches of lawn and the ghosts of the Hohokam sleep
until nighthawks sharpen their wings. Then comes the time
by starlight and streetlight and light ancient memory casts
to wander light of step. Gate here, shadow there, a cluster
of thorns and a fence giving way while asphalt dreams. There’s a desert
underground, a highway through the sky,
the clock sweats minutes three to four to doves and thirst
and the mountain’s breath follows the wash where all
it takes is water for a miracle occurring. Just see
how a coyote passes through a cinder block wall.
Summer Night Calls
Summer with the monsoon in her claws calling through the dark, wind beneath one wing, rain the other with thunder on the run behind the moon. Clouds above the desert part to let migration through; storms come,
storms go, grosbeaks bound for Mexico and the forecast is for mountains becoming a whetstone to prepare lightning for its work
of picking summer’s bones until they’re dry.
Summer Storm
Time to tie down the lawn, there’s a wind on the way that loves grass. Better gather up keepsakes before they disappear for good, gather stones to place on top of them. No difference between an ill wind
and a fresh one, they all want. And want. They don’t choose between what’s useful and what only takes up space; it’s take and take and watch it fly. Lock the doors, pull the blinds down, tell the cats storms don’t need their food. But if
that box full of old letters has finally become a burden let it go, have the weather choose
between memories and thunder.
Summer’s Closet
I Thunder rolling down a woodpecker’s back, a whisper of rain touches down and a rainbow grows out of the mountain. Another day comes tumbling from the clouds, another century checks off years in the desert. There’s a lizard’s dry leaf rustle in the yard with a hundred Earth years in a run and a tail whipping stormlight as it fades. The lizard’s in his moment, quick-stepping grass to stone and up along the back yard wall at the speed of memory disappearing. And he leaves the big question behind: did anything happen if nobody remembers? May as well ask the spirits who fly twice around the universe before they touch the Earth.
II Mid-afternoon, a hundred- eleven degrees, the hummingbird alights on a thread of shade and the bedroom closet wants to know whether to keep the old photos stored there, the letters and cards long considered too precious to discard. The season is confused; the sun has a photographic memory and the wind no memory at all.
III The path through an arroyo isn’t sentimental, doesn’t even keep the tracks and footprints left by those who walk there or the javelinas breaking darkness open. Every day new shadows and gravel readjusting to the light. Every day letters, pictures, cards kept only for the sake of keeping still keep to themselves, content with being filed away next to pots and pans and shirts and socks and the ands go on until the keepsakes grow jealous. Rocks alive, they catch the scent of rain, and rain knows best what’s worth the space it rests in.
IV There’s an owl’s call rubbing on the moon, old letters turning over in their sleep, the drawers in which they’re kept don’t know which year it is. Full moon, the sky clock says midnight while time on the ground is a matter of opinion. Depends on the postmark, the way old times send reminders of themselves stamped and sealed with no return address.
V Desert clean, there’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be. Erosion files excess away and flash floods take what only water wants. No need for any documents beyond a snakeskin or the pellets coughed out by an owl. Rain is all that’s written and with such economy there’s beauty in a blank page waiting for the silences to come. No archives here, no trace of happiness or pain beyond the scars that lightning leaves by which to remember a brightness enabling even stones to see.
VI Cooper’s hawk down by a shallow earthbound dish to drink a few degrees away. Concentration in his eye and flight muscles folded, he’s just erased dove calls from the air and now he’s sunlight on the run. No way back to ground to know if anything was real. Sometimes a memory’s a woodpecker, clinging by its feet to the sky, sometimes a raptor. Never comes when called, takes time and melancholia to find in spaces crying for the present tense. Now he’s back and he’s thirsty.
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Acknowledgements: Abbey: Peakline, Rocklight, Over Silverton, The Afterstorm, World upon World Amethyst Review: Awakenings The Blue Guitar: Everyday’s Desert, Raptor Now, The Storm of August 25th Canary: Coyote, Roadrunning, Night Vision Cholla Needles: Hawk, Claw Eunioa Review: Restoration, Downslope, Belonging, Clear Day, Cloudcover, Summer Night Calls, Summer Storm, Summer’s Closet International Times: The Inner Life of Landscape , Desert Blue, Run, Newstrail, Night’s Music, Creation’s Summer, Summer Blue, Backyard Summer January Review: Ahwatukee AM misfitmagazine: Pyrocephalus rubinus Neologism: Beth The New Verse News: Migraciones, Rewriting the Border 5enses: Sun Rising Third Wednesday: Mockingbird, Octavio Verse-Virtual: In Time, Winter’s Desert, Tracks Across the Sky, Gila Woodpecker in a Stormy Dusk, Migration Watch |