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.
