Poetry
Ales Krivec For Unsplash+
Just beyond the Road’s Edge
Just beyond the road’s edge
in the country of black-eyed Susans
and Russian thistle—
just beyond the crumbling line
where asphalt stops and washboard
gravel begins—just beyond the turnoff
to the two-track leading straight as an arrow
toward an outcrop where my mapping suggests
I’ll find fossils to reduce the great unknown
within a stratigraphic driftfield of years
stretching from trilobites to bivalve surge.
The unassuming outcrop’s half-drowned
in platy shale, silty limestone chock full
of ammonites where, after labeling samples
and making notes, I sit, listening
to Time’s unresolved echo.
Listen to the Desert
Listen to the sound
of the last ounce of water sloshing
in the plastic milk jug tied to the waist
of a migrant lost in an endless baking night
somewhere north of the Devil’s Highway,
to the snail darters in the last remaining pool
of a once vigorous Sonoita Creek.
Search out the secrets
locked in the cells of the saguaro,
the prickly pear tuna, the teddy bear cholla.
These cells teach us how to live simply, how to lean
into the land, not overpower it. Be
watchful. All is eye to see, ear to hear, nose
to scent, touch to embrace. Remember
that where there has been a beginning,
an ending follows. But let it not be an ending
of all except termites and roaches
and kissing bugs.
In the beginning
was rocky landscape. In the beginning
the Sonoran Desert was a seabed. And when
it became a continent dressed in flora
and transected by through-going streams, ancestor
mammals survived in the shadows
of reptiles and amphibians. For eons upon eons
those small creatures mated, procreated, burrowed
and adapted, while the earth below them
continued to transform itself. Whole lineages
failed. And when Chicxulub received
the stony messenger of death our forebears
survived the endless winter. Extinction’s
just another word for losing.
Permanently.
Do not turn away
from the emptiness—the haunting,
lingering sense you’ve lost the meaning
of living. Enter the silence and desolation
of spinning galaxies, the fragility and strength
of minute cells where Life
is hidden. Sit with them. Listen
to the mysteries.
Echoes of Falling Water
Cherish the memory
of the singing mountain, the orchestra
and echoes of falling water, the loneliest lie,
the economy of abundance belied
by dust, alkali playas, dry arroyos—
mute witnesses to memory.
At day’s end the wind, sung
from the mountaintop at dawn, descends
the canyons of the Santa Catalinas
to spill out over the Tucson Valley. The drying husks
of catclaws and gourds quiver
like a shaman’s rattle.
Monsoon clouds glide in
from the southeast. Like a mad woman dancing
a tarantella, water rhythmically pelts
the quivering floor of asphalt, dirt, and crushed
granite gravel along la Calle de Nuestra Señora,
Our Lady Street.
Under the advancing
blue cup of night, cicadas churr
and red-spotted toads gather
at the edges of puddles, clear
their high-pitched rusty flutes and summon
mates, as if they had only this single
stretch of minutes, this one
evensong, to consummate life’s journey.
The sky clears over the Rio Santa Cruz.
Spadefoot and Colorado River toads shrill
amid the marshland reeds. A ray
from the setting sun finds
a crimson dragonfly resting
for a quivering moment on a slender stalk
before resuming its dance of figure 8s
above a pool. The world sings a canticle
of creation, sings of an endless, astonishing now
on the crooked road.