Desert

song of the multitude

she is multitude
she contains ecosystems
she is immense
filled from edge to edge with wilderness

she bathes in nightfall
and walks with death

she heals the forgotten and the outcast
moves in silence through shadow

sleeps in a mantle of tranquility

and like a leaf unfurling
bursts from joy in the light of dawn

she weaves her web on the strongest boughs

she watches from the high ground
of the mountain
and listens in the low places
of the valley

she can see the small things
and hear the small voices
of the earth

her hawk-sight soars far through the air

her song is water flowing over rock

she is guided by the stars

she is interlinked

her eye is uncovered

she is the dry country drinking the monsoon rain

her mind is the undersoil network electric
of the ancient forest
from mycorrhizae to heartwood
where the hare darts through the unrolling ferns

her heart is the cumulonimbus
towering anvil thunderstorm
lightning arcing into the dust and the dirt
where the coyote runs over the darkening desert

her soul is the deep of the estuary
where the ocean welcomes the river
after its long journey
where the salmon come home

once in every circuit
of our planet
around our sun

in this furthest arm of our galaxy
spattered among the deep space countless
where gravity bows before the unknown

she is multitude

Distance

Sometimes, there’s a place where the grass and the sage, pine and cottonwood, rocks and scrub and a cactus or two — maybe piñon and mesquite and yucca and so forth — they all get together and make up a kind of existence that’s mildly intoxicating.

Places like this are important if you’re extra-sober to begin with.
Say if, for example, you happen to be born that way.

Little breezes ruffle and shift the scents around.
Sometimes the wind really kicks up and does its best to rearrange your day.

Mostly, these areas aren’t burdened with an overabundance of trees or houses.
You can see the horizon. You can breathe in deep and feel your mind flatten out.
Memory and time stop fighting each other. Your worst enemy might be a fence or two.

I don’t generally have anything against concentrations of trees or houses — or people, for that matter — but I need to be out in the wide angle, out in the open kind of wild.

You can see the storms coming in of an evening.
Hear the wind searching. Feel the thunder unroll, look at the lightning crack.
You can see the sun breaking in yellow through the mist or dying down red in the clouds, and you can watch it all coming in and get yourself together.

You can give yourself to it. It’s like getting ready for church or mass.
Like a wedding or a funeral.

Folks tend to be fearful of a skeleton.
Something about bone laid out bare to the weather, I’d wager.
Out there, you get reminded you’ve got one inside you. You were born with it.

Things in the land and things within us consummate and live and die all the time.
Out there you can feel it, know it for what it is — a sort of honesty uncontrived.

You can see it all coming, and see it all going.

Coyote

You know how headlights,
when you’re near a desert highway,
pan across material like a searchlight,
casting incoherent shadows
past whatever they happen to catch –

sage, cactus green and praying to the rain,
hitchhiker’s drugstore cowpuncher boots,
corrugated lean-to slumped up against the wire?

Well that isn’t happening just yet.

Coyote isn’t on the wander right now.

The sun is still walking, heading west,
knowing exactly where to go.

Daylight melts over dust and hardpan,
yellow, umber, ochre, neon hot pink.

Memory melts like daylight.

Those clouds, see. That’s what I mean.
Cirro… cumulo… cirronimbulus?

It rises, dark and thick in the gloaming.
It drinks the melted daylight.

A rush of cool air. Scattering of sand.
Silent stab of arced lightning.
One million volts in a terawatt cycle.

Thunderstorms drink memory like daylight.
They amplify.
They make ready for the night.

You should come tell me what you think.

Silence. Rumbling over the distance of the earth.

Silence.

Cumulonimbus. That’s it.

You’d have gotten that quicker.

Silence.

Scent of the dry before the wet.

Burning gold at the end of the sunwalk
underneath the dark tower.

There. Coyote’s on the wander. Hungry.

The semi-truck moves past
and headlights cast no shadows beyond a ghost.

Thirst.

Thunder.

Hunger.

Arclight.

Silence.