May 23, 2012

A late start, school this morning, and then before I though of it, starting to grade their final exams, and now I need a break and a poem.  It's summer outside, hot and sticky and blindingly bright!  There is only one part of that I don't like . . . sticky!  The heat in the car when I got out of class just soaked into my bones and was the first time I really felt warm since last summer <smile>!  Nobody seems to understand that the real heat in a closed up car really does feel like it's soaking down through the skin to warm up your bones.  I have never minded the heat but sometimes our humidity can be very oppressive, like trying to breathe soup, the air tends to move sluggishly in and out of your lungs, and your skin seems to condense water out of the air, leaving your clothes sticking to that dampness.  This is the time of year I miss the desert most, when it's just beginning to get hot.  There the heat is so different that sometimes you have a hard time imagining it's from the same source.

There were a dozen mourning doves on the driveway as I left this morning, usually I only see one, maybe two.  This morning the driveway was awash with cooing that sounds like a little owl, a sad little owl at that.  They all flew up in a gray cloud when I started the car and vanished in seconds. 

Today, longing for the desert, I'm going to send a poem I wrote while living there.  Kind of like a way to both acknowledge the longing and ease it a little. 

Desert

There is something
about the land
I cannot condense
and pour into your ear
or lay at your feet.

Sometimes the air
blooms up the mountainside
like fine white flour.

A raven's stellar eye
stalks the fractured earth
for an absence of motion.

Wind waves of sand
crash against the glass
howling at separation.

Seldom rains
clatter down on plants
living a stone's life.

There is something other
and the other
cannot be named,
but can be felt
through the skin
like the slow numb
blade of a knife.

All those desert things seem so alien here, where we are surrounded by so much green and water in every form, creek, bayou, bay, gulf.  Rainfall here would be a deluge in the desert, though we verge on drought, the desert never lives expecting rain, it celebrates when it arrives and then lets it go.  Things bloom in an instant, even small shrimp in Death Valley suddenly come out of . . . hiding and flourish briefly in the shallow brackish puddles.  A few days after a rain, there is green in so many unexpected places, and in the spring carpets of flowers, or arbors of tiny fragrant pink roses in the canyons.  Still, here it's hard to imagine this country as dangerous, though it certainly has its share, but when you live in the desert, you know it can kill you, you understand that on some fundamental level you never forget or fail to recognize.   One year in the desert, it did not rain the entire year, and yes, that was not normal, but things went on pretty much as they always had; here an entire year without rain, which I don't think has ever happened, and it's catastrophe, things die all over, lakes dry up, and houses crack, and that happens when there is still rain, just not as much as we are used to.   Both places are home to a variety of people and creatures who live there.  Here, life is perhaps easier, perhaps more gentle. but not any more beautiful, just a different kind of beauty in both places, both under the same sky, both at the mercy of circumstances, weather, and civilization.  Both feel like home to me.