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Canyon at Picacho
O glorious! the ancients said
when words failed them,
when description seemed beside the point,
when the natural world was almost too much.
Not just too much to behold,
but too much to hold, to embrace
for the arms of a mortal man,
though his spirit seemed equal to it
and was for which reason he uttered
a single word from his heart: Hallelujah!
or Glorious! or simply, Ah!
Here in the deep desert it is painted rock,
eagle, lizard, jackrabbit, fierce-eyed owl.
They fly off, scamper, before the binoculars
can get to my eyes. Is it my footsteps
that has rustled them up or were they about
to go that way anyway? Both, I imagine.
And, too, they are gracious hosts, making
way for the afternoon visitor.
The owl just vacated the roofless cave
at canyon’s end where I’ve stopped awhile;
a polite but unnecessary gesture since
there’s plenty of room for both of us.
I know this is your land, your home,
feathered or four legged friend of my spirit.
I the guest here, yet call it my home as well
when I hear the red cliffs cry out, Brother!
when I walk the arroyo heart full of color,
when I crouch in awe over a mauve wild flower,
when I drop backpack to climb a crumbling mound
or doff clothes, including boots, to bare my love,
to return a few moments as born to the elements
without dying and to leave an offering
from my sensual body erotic under the hot sun.
Yes, this is my land, it is made of me.
It is my lover and shall receive my manhood.
It has my spirit written all over it.
It is my inheritance, my song, my womb.
It is my death and life combined.
It is my gift both to myself and to others.
If I share my soul I share this terrain.
I am home (though in a day or two I leave)
a home I cannot dwell in like the eagle
the coyote, the wild burro, the laughing quail --
but home nonetheless if heart’s refuge be home.
I will be quite now, let the ancients speak
from the red walls of this canyon.
It is truly glorious, they say.
Speak for us, they tell me,
so someone will know what we meant.
Deep Dark Song
(remembering Lorca)
On one hand crickets
in sonorous pulsations
the monotonous shaman’s rhythm
on the other night
bent to teach ecstasy and death
both hands join to applaud the deep dark song
that wails in a moonbeam
or provokes a soul on a distant star
to laughter
There is no need any longer
to hide your black mane from the rain
shake your hair in the wind’s teeth
undo the top button of your shirt
take off your shoes feel the stars’ napalm
being crushed under the empire of your soles
It is the undiscovered planet’s birthday
that one we can only see through a telescope
made of exuberance
whose lens far from being rose tinted
is the color of overripe pomegranates
blood on the eyepiece a lover was murdered with
the joy it foreshadows gleams like a blade
that sang its way into the heart
of a very tender bird that had built
a nest on a hanging vine to bring forth its young
It was a hummingbird there were two small eggs
in the nest like two tiny scrotums
bared to the dangerous songs of a gentle night
no one knew how tenderly that bird sat
guarding her offspring or whether they’d hatched
Of what moment is the circus to a man
about to be executed his heart mute
as that hummingbird’s his last night a refutation
of all that exists outside stillness
death might as well be a flamenco dancer
rapping his furious heels on a shed tear
snapping his fingers at the coastal mist
The desert night will fit in a matchbox
as will all the strange flowers that grow
to be transformed into rock or poetry
all the heavenly bodies we could not see
with blood dripping from our eyes
the artillery of starjuice filling our bones
so that we were blind to the radiance of black
5.16.07
Desert Speech
I have said so much sitting
like this under a sun that both
loves and hates me.
It must love me
because my warm blood says so;
it must hate me
because it makes me sweat so.
I have said more perhaps than the sun
would have me say.
But why am I going on about the sun?
Must I ask its permission to speak?
All right then, let me refer instead to the palm fronds
that sing like a waterfall in my wine glass,
or mention how the untamed wind
tells me I only belong here if I am willing
to be wild as it is
and as inconsistent,
serene as a corpse one moment,
screaming like a marauder the next.
But why should I go on about the wind
or blue sky or sand or rocks or citrus trees
as if these were the testament of my worth?
Surely death in life (my ultimate guru)
has a nakeder lesson, an older wine,
a dance to the beat of fiercer seas
to teach, to buffet me with, to drink,
to break me like a medusa raft on sharper waves
of insight or ecstasy than this serene moment
in my backyard offers?
Where the ghost of speech teases
the spiked agave and nature beyond the wall
is waiting to tell me
there are more words than you dreamed of
just below the blowing sands,
in the arroyos of stillness and violence
celebrated in the cactus wren’s screech,
the phainopepla's chorus or the coyote’s daysleep.
There are even verbal nuggets hiding
in the desert willow’s tiny green leaves --
torrents of sound, furious rivers of absurdity.
And guess what? they do not belong to you,
but you may have them if you hear them,
you may do with them what you will.
But only if you love them enough,
you whose roots go as deep into mystery
as the creosote’s do in this arid land.
Give Back the Fire
Why decry this numbness of heart
that has kept me silent so long?
True, the dead are in me with a shout,
but for months the sun has spoken louder.
Enough about natural wonders, fragrances.
In this soporific heat I’ve returned to idleness
filled with a single crow’s watery yawp
as it flies into blue, an extinguished flame.
There are no answers for unasked questions --
as if fate were a riddle to those not seeking one.
I have plenty of time yet to turn my back
on the cholla that would snag me for a wren.
Why build a nest where the sand blows away
what you’ve acquired? In the wash lies a bit
of fool’s gold, maybe a rotting branch of wisdom.
I’m no bird, I’ll hike up the canyon’s mouth,
there listen to the voices death deposits in me
like minerals in a land whose rocks make you glad.
No crematory this desert but a light-drenched concert
that returns to the fire its tendency to resurrect.
Meditation on Being Now
It is not memory’s fault
that the hand on the wall appears drunken.
There’s a taste on your tongue
that you’ve never explored;
it leads to the stillness of sensation
and the eternal veracity of a flower’s kiss.
“Your nostrils or your life,”
the thief of memory quips,
threatening, challenging, obliging you
to stand a moment at the intersection
of all your senses, being the tree
that’s shaped like your desire,
being the story of a garden
only you can cast yourself out of.
It is all one to the beast who sleeps
through the psychic terrors
that rip a city to shreds
in one man’s blood.
And if that man suddenly tastes
the elixir of all his libidinous nights,
wrapping his thighs in the tongues
of seas that drown his cold moans
or cast broken ships on his genitals’ shores,
he wont know what man or woman he’s lain with,
but he’ll know that a name greater than his
is carved in his semen.
His sex nurtures the journey
taken to commemorate an explosive touch.
His naked moment is the now
that plays like a lonely child
in a field of wild mustangs.
To ride is to efface the murmurs
of the past that monopolize thought.
It’s to sprinkle dust on his lips,
hoping that no one will mop the floor
with his words
until he is safely (or inconspicuously)
out of harm’s way
and into the clarity that tells him
what the shaman knows about rain
and the best time to wish for it.
Dryly he’ll kiss the mouth glued to his,
knowing silence vies with song behind
the closed doors that shut out a paradise
glistening in a bead of water.
He’ll dream of oceans flooding each step
that unites both sides of the door,
the terrain that grows wings
on the trees to which he is the forest.
Psalm
I am enamored of all that exists. There is
so much to love, to use, to see, to praise.
I love whatever has a name
just because it can be spoken of.
Phenomena, my god! Things, my Rilkean destiny!
I am both concretized and annihilated in you.
And to speak with a silver flame
of recognition and magic snaking from my lips,
that is my secretest joy,
my infernal ecstasy,
the heights of my mind’s skyscrapers
in a city shaped like a cornucopia
spilling the effluence of a thousand lifetimes
in one tiny life dwarfed by a single millennium --
name it, whichever one you choose --
a hologram of history fulfilling itself,
polishing its mirror despite the tarnish,
practicing the art of the quotidian
which becomes my fate, nemesis, pride.
I am used up in what I use.
Shall I begin naming names?
My logbook would become a solar system,
my journal an inventory inexhaustible
in its litany of dimensions,
its record of all things sweet to the touch,
real to the mind just because imagined.
My mind is a warehouse cum dance floor
for the spoonful of sensation I taste every second.
I want to eat every movement of my being.
I am obsessed with chewing the bones of phenomena.
I will digest the world I have caressed
and die fat with the dirt of my feasting.
Sung Under the Moon
Moon dry as the blood at midnight,
there’s an ache in the dark, sobering;
a hurt that wants to cry but can’t.
There’s a country at your doorstep,
festering, constipated, backed up
like a sewer that can’t let out the rats
in its heart. There’s a dream of evil
for evil concocted by those who see you
only as a tourist destination, an ego trip.
Dry desert moon one day past full,
I may as well call you round.
Your whiteness is the pupil of night
piercing softly, attar of silence
fruit of solitude, beacon of calm.
No coyote to howl at you tonight,
no bullet hole to dare you to bleed,
you caress emptiness with an empty stare.
You syphon the petals from my soul
and a flower that makes me mad
with mystery grows, painted,
suspended and rising above hills
in this equation of fascination.
Why cant I take my eyes from you?
If I close them will you take me in your arms,
or should I be content to drink wine
on your sobering shore?
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