August 7, 2012

Morning after rain . . . the green more than green, so vital you almost have to squint.  Hundreds of tiny curly flowers fell down with the rain and hang around a lot longer.  The sun breaks through the green in places and even the sparse grass in the shade of the trees seems to glow.  My stilly heron is patched with light and, though I hear the hum of a lawnmower and overhead the distant roar of a jet, it seems the cicadas are only sporadic this morning, perhaps they are winding down after their long summer of singing.

This morning sitting at the window there is nothing quite as poignant as some green place you love, where everything is familiar and yet new again each day.

My Mojave   

Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.

A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)

Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world,
Completing its changes
With no change.

In the morning after a storm,
We used brooms. Out front,
There was broken glass to collect.
In the backyard, the sand
Was covered with transparent wings.
The insects could not use them in the wind
And so abandoned them. Why
Hadn't the wings scattered? Why
Did they lie so stilly where they'd dropped?
It can only be the wind passed through them.

Jealous lover,
Your desire
Passes the same way.

And jealous earth,
There is a shadow you cannot keep
To yourself alone.
At midday,
My soul wants only to go
The black road which is the white road.
I'm not needed
Like wings in a storm,
And God is the storm.

Donald Revell

I'm amazed at the correspondence sometimes between this green place and the desert.  Here it's flowers that are scattered after the storm.  And though there is no mirage here at the moment, the empty husks of the cicadas left on trees are still and without song.  The summer has passed through them, and though I am not needed out there in that green world, like the poet, my soul wants to go and live there, even amid mirages and empty shells, even where things are not always what they seem when they glow with summer, light slanting off the wings of a blue jay, white clouds like whipped cream darkening perhaps to storm.  In the desert you might never know whether what is blowing your way will be sand or rain.  Here it's more likely to be rain, splitting the heat, but other things are a question.  Does that storm enter the gulf and bring more rain than we can handle, more wind than the trees can hold, or does it wander to the wilds of Mexico, or fizzle?  As God is the storm . . . you can never be certain, and that is evidently part of the mystery, compensation or completion of the world where things can change and still remain.