Wednesday, December 1, 2021

On Autumn Delights - California in November

 


Since the stream dried out, yucca is no longer blooming, and I cannot wade in ankle-deep water, I stopped going for walks in the Wash. How many times can you walk down the same path and not get bored? I got restless in front of my laptop one lovely, sunny afternoon when the sky was perfect sapphire or lapis-lazuli, so brilliant and the sun just became golden, painting the hills into hues of amber and linden honey.




A surprise was waiting for me among pungent bushes of sage and manzanita - some yucca stalks, dried and lifeless were perfectly golden in the setting sun. So a poem came back home with me from that peaceful walk. 


Fall Yucca


Golden stems shine like beams of sunset

piercing the purple valley that sinks

into darkness under a soap-bubble sky.


The stems lean sideways, imperceptibly falling

- these are our leaning towers of Yucca in the desert 

valley that I make my home. I breathe deeply, delighted 


by the omnipresent sheen and sparkle of sonorous 

cicadas that rush to surround me with their scintillating

songs of summer, before rains silence them into sleep.


Long, narrow yucca leaves gather at the stems

like supersonic star-beams meeting at one point 

on the horizon, blurred by velocity of a Star Wars flight.


They burst out at dusk with a silvery glow 

of moonlight - then detach from their drying stems 

to crumble into the thick charcoal of the earth.


The yucca's white lily flowers have long turned into 

bunches of seed-pods - waiting to fall and germinate 

into spikes of sharp leaves that poke from the rocky soil 


with a promise and a certainty of survival – 

the next year's yucca.  Shadows reveal sparks

of icy stars above me – I walk home, content. 



My rock heart that I wrote a ballad about and kept placing on a little indent in a larger rock is gone, so I found another rock heart and placed it right there. This place I call the Rock Heart Valley, so it has to have its heart!  Nearby someone put together a tall cairn of rocks, so I took a photo  of it. 



I'm not the only one here interested in rock art. someone else put together a spiral to walk into and outside. I did that and got dizzy from turning inwards at smaller and smaller angles, until the whole valley was rotating around me, standing transfixed under the sapphire sky. 





The nights are cool these days, winter chill comes out right after sunset, though it still feels like summer in direct sunlight. Roses like it and after slumbering through the hottest months of the year, July through September, they finally started blooming again. I have several new, fragrant varieties to join the pink French Perfume that had as many as 30 roses simultaneously.  The smaller bushes have one or two, but so pretty in their rainbow colors and delicate, intoxicating scents.  Sometimes I stand in front of the rose bush and take 10-20-30 breaths of the rose perfume - aromatherapy done live!  Here's a new poem about the two-color rose, cream inside, blush pink outside, called the Double Delight. 



Double Delight


Gentle as dawn, clearing 

the sky of midnight nightmares 

my November rose smiles to herself 

rearranging the bluh and pink crinoline 

of petals folded into a heart –

her secret within


She tells me to laugh 

and laugh again, overflowing 

with childish joy, champaign bubbling 

in a crystal – while the air around me –

is heavy with cries of panic, anguish, hate.


“What of the news?” you say, 

“Who lived, who died, who suffered?”

I’m silent, exploring the inner landscapes 

that only music knows – the infinity 

of cellos, violins, and the lover’s gaze 

locked in the key of brightness.





I'm grateful for my Double Delight, I'm grateful for my pomegranates, here filled with thank-yous in so many languages. Gratitude is the virtue of blessings. 








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