Three notes all it took
They knew they knew the tune
And skipped on by
They’re skippers or seekers
Searching for the unrecognized
The never heard
I’ve heard your notes
But never learned them
I rehearsed and I sang along
And I didn’t skip on by
The song is only a trickle now
I’m guarding it with my life
Like the last tributary
Of a once great river
Ran dry from drought and misuse
You are wind chimes and crickets
And leaves crunching underfoot
I mowed the lawn for the first time in three months, it was high, but not so bad, because, you know, the drought.
it that yellow clay brother
five years in any direction
before you saw something other
than your own reflection
even then it just a cactus or a rock
it that yellow clay brother
leaves its mark
and you don’t know where your life gone
hard and cracked when it wasn’t running
slick in a temporary stream
sink in get stuck lose a shoe lose a sock
it that yellow clay brother
cut you up
This is from August 2010. I’m unsure if I’ve ever posted a version of it—I certainly can’t find it if I did. So here’s what may prove to be a slightly different version of another poem.
I pick up the shovel to the crack of thunder. The cool wind kicks the dust of hot earth onto my face. It mixes with salty sweat and dries into a hard second skin. This sandy clay, this loam, is as soft as any lovers skin and as hard as thick roots and rock.
I mix it with top soil and compost until it reaches an ideal consistency. Until it stays moist but doesn’t become waterlogged. Until it can maintain cohesion without becoming hard.
I concoct an elixir from the decaying wood of a dead tree; the topsoil of abandoned flower beds; the detritus of my coffee and tea addiction; onion and garlic skins. I mix and blend and water.
I avoid hornets far too big to be real. I maintain as tarantulas the size of my fist fixate on my slightest movement—bobbing down ready to jump. I talk to them in my crackling voice.
Thunder and cold wind. Cloudy shadows and distant lightning. I wait for the rain to break. I sit reading fantastic tales of Invisible Cities. I yield my watering to the inevitable rain. I focus on the sweat rolling down my back as it gets lost in tangles of hair.
I put down the shovel and wipe my face, a million cuts burn as the dry sand grinds in. I can smell the inevitable. Cool wind eases my irritated skin. I wait for rain and drink wine as thunder passes by.
I give up and fertilize some plants and let others starve. I am frustrated on the edge of deliverance from an overly dry summer. But the rain still won’t come.
I want to feel rain splattering on my face as I turn the page. I want nature to run its course and water the plants as I relax and enjoy the process as it was mindlessly designed. I want instinct to take over. I want to stop thinking. I want the sky to break open a torrent of rain.
I can feel the rain impossibly near. I can smell it closer now. It’s only the lack of splattering raindrops that keeps this from being a fully formed thunderstorm.
Every time I give up there’s that gust of wind. That strike of lightening. That roiling thunder that brings a ferocious smile to my face..
I pickup and put down the shovel, the spade, the hose, the rake. I search the heavens for a sign. I smell it approaching.
I feel it. All the insects and birds and spiders have retreated to where ever they go to and still there is no rain.
It is dark in the middle of the day; perpetual shadows and cool moist air twirl in the utter quiet carved from teasing thunder.
I am covered head to toe in dirt and sand and clay and sweat as the promise of rain dies in a blast of bright heat.
All I can tell you is words come slow like rain in the middle of what would become known simply as the drought—a little understatement we could hang on to while hot winds scoured the landscape. Winter ended swiftly. In one day the ice melted and the hot wind arose from out of the west. The hills grew ragged and dusty.
The wind shifted north, killing off livestock. Eventually we were blasted by hot currents from every direction. It never rained again, the wind never died, everything crumbled. I don’t remember that last day other than as a dream: delicate flesh stinging from the cold; brittle ice cutting into cheeks; a red nose peeks out from under a scarf.
I awoke to the itching and flaking of burnt flesh, in time to catch a tree slowly falling, its topmost branches snap loose, crash into the rugged earth, and crumble before the trunk catches up. In the beginning the downed wood would have been swarmed by carpenter ants and termites—but there are none left, they couldn’t survive the undying furnace, ever stoked by growing windstorms.
Every step was thought to be the last. Every step digging a little deeper into the loose ground. After the trees abated their war against gravity, their dry roots gave way and forests fell. Collapsing like the rest of life, simply giving up and letting go and laying down en masse.
The terrible wind blows and trees die. It howls and you know there is one less thing to care about. The sun glares and you bleed dry, and you walk—trying to stand on loose ground. Trying to walk over ground that crumbles into the hallows left by decayed roots. There was a time, I remind myself, that the ground was solid. When the earth was supported by a series of roots, invisible but for the structures they supported. There was a strong and resilient earth, covered with life drawing strength from an invisible web of roots. Roots surrounded by damp ground. Roots I once cursed for hampering my digging. Roots that meandered their way into my compost heap, seemingly demanding to be dug out—extinguished.
Roots that would have died by now anyway. Roots that were the last to see it coming. Roots that didn’t know that the world above was withering into dust, and sand, and neglect. Suddenly alone in empty dry ground. Suddenly vanishing, ripping open holes in their death.
Welcome home. Welcome to a world where a thousand non-decisions have been cast by outsiders, a thousand words of advice from unaware and unmindful idols flinging unthoughtful opinions at their trusting admirers. Leading, eventually, to dry winds scouring a hallow earth.
