The Inner Life of Landscape David Chorlton The Inner Life of Landscape Desert Blue Restoration Downslope In Time Winter’s Desert Tracks Across the sky Run Everyday’s Desert Newstrail Belonging Clear Day Cloudcover Acknowledgements; The Blue Guitar: Everyday’s Desert Eunioa Review: Restoration, Downslope, Belonging, Clear Day, Cloudcover International Times: The Inner Life of Landscape , Desert Blue, Run, Newstrail Verse-Virtual: In Time, Winter’s Desert, Tracks Across the Sky
The Inner Life of Landscape No rest along the ridgeline. A thought can float to where the sky begins and disappear. No problem, it’s life in mountain time, passing slowly rock by rock and even slower deep inside where not even the coyotes see what’s going on. An upward thrust, heat flowing in the dark, some stress and pressure and soon it is a moodswing turned to stone. A snake at rest undreams the image of the rocky face that casts a shadow over him. Light cannot hear the whiplash moment of a bite, the way in greener landscapes grass cannot hear the quaking underneath it. Hawks afloat on thermals, sunlight seeking refuge in arroyos. The surface is so alive imagination can’t reach the geological salad inside Earth.
Desert wide the only symmetry is a pair of ravens as they interrupt their ground search with the dip and rise of pleasure on the wing while they shine above a mountain that eats time. Holds its ground, welcomes Rock wrens home, shoulders stars at midnight, and shelters underneath an owl’s wing. Waits patiently for one good storm to wash a year of suffering away.
Weather’s only skin deep, come wind, come lightning, flash flood on the run, water singing to cure the headache in the lithosphere. The interior’s exchange rate is a cubic yard of darkness for a cubic yard of light. It’s quiet enough there for stones to think. Some ache when memories possess them, others smile at having been released from a world of lies and all of them learn there’s no way back from being a dream.
Desert Blue Thirsty light on a trail through foothills that can’t sleep. An owl coughs fur and bones out from a mesquite branch, the pulse rate of the desert slows. The stones in an arroyo wake up to better see what treads on them: a lost soul seeking refuge or a palo verde tired of being rooted down and trailing its roots behind as it goes wandering.
A star on every cactus thorn and a coyote running with the moon between his teeth.
Blue memory, each step a guess in the dark. Two o’clock can’t see where one o’clock has been. Which way to rain? No difference to the sky between thunder and a prayer.
Restoration Silent as a raven’s shadow over aching rocks the season’s heat clears every day a space where it rests until the sky can breathe. Mouse bones rest next to javelina tracks that point downslope while the deep earth listens to the surface and hears nothing but the steady drip of starlight into dust. Night, day, to the sun they’re just the land opening and closing its eyes, just thirst talking to itself the way lost travelers do. There’s tightening in saguaros’ core, tree roots breaking ground and ground flowing up and over inclines, down arroyo beds to where a stone becomes a sigh. To anyone not desert there’s an air of desolation in mesquites straining where they stand but it’s waiting that holds on to a place within the universe where drought and resurrection exist
until the rains arrive to conjoin them. Comes a time earth feels what palos verdes do when it becomes so dry that silence crunches underfoot. Then lightning comes to save what can be saved at summer’s end, with moths exploring new growth as flash floods bring the desert to life and coyotes are back to their nights licking salt from the moon.
Downslope The dip and pull by which forces underground draw rock, mesquite and gravel trails down make imbalance of the mountain as it leans against November light. So rough and nothing stands except by virtue of the weight it stands against, textures flow into each other and dissolve, arroyos take direction from the clouds. All a kind of sacred chaos these formations and the creases in between. Turn and rise, decay, take root, live as often as the rain allows. Follow any crooked route from sky to earth and down from where the boulders are embedded in deep time on land with nothing to be but itself. A hawk passes through the sun with eyesight that reveals the inner life of everything in the wide unplanned below with every stone finding a place at journey’s end to be heat, to be
lightning, to be among the weights that hold desert to the Earth.
In Time The Earth didn’t know when it buckled it would mountain its way toward sky and press against emptiness till light and darkness tumbled down together to be desert. Where sunlight leaves fresh tracks at every passing, where nights are dry whispers that guide a Great-horned owl to prey and scorpions have a compass needle at the tip of the their tails. It points to where any given trail disappears. A bend, a twist, the ground can’t feel the steps of a coyote touching lighter than moonlight on ripples in the desert’s skin. Trails of sand and shadow, space to be alone in
and alive. Seasons climb a rock face, come back down an incline between palos verdes and creosote bushes that feign their expiration but green into the after rain. Run, Jackrabbit run, there’s lightning on your tail. Monsoon come, monsoon go, the rocks endure it all, they’ve been here since the underworld broke free, they know that fire is only time that’s grown impatient.
Winter’s Desert Winter light so sharp the ridge could slice open the sky to release the mysteries beyond it, let them fall down onto Earth and tell what desert’s made of. Unquiet energy become dry land and heat, a rain shower once a year, the nightly passing of coyote souls in blue darkness, and on the shortest day a chill that punctures air with thorns. A Turkey vulture drags his shadow down, across the shining ground and back up to the height from which he sees creation’s violence calmed into arroyos. A thousand years to shift some stones downward, a thousand more for them to settle and every monsoon’s final gesture the teacupful of wind that whistles for cool weather to begin. Ice on the horizon, flock of sparrows busying mesquite and tracks left behind by the stars. Mockingbird, thrasher, echo
that can’t find the way to the call it once was. No records ever kept of how nascent fires burned down to the glow of late afternoons on a mountain shedding light just enough to fill the skin a rattlesnake no longer needs.
Tracks Across the Sky Javelina crunching stars, jackrabbits with ears to receive the music of the universe while coyotes stir moonlight into blue air with their tails. There is a deadly beauty to the hour. So softly sheathed are talons of the owl and when a bobcat springs from rock his muscles flow beneath the skin as easily as a blessing that flies above hunger and lies. No way out from an arroyo when prints run on sand and gravel and along a passing cloud. And when the night goes back inside those cavities within a desert canyon left behind are tracks that follow tracks on land and on the atmosphere beyond knowledge, where predators see in darkness and a raccoon is so curious to know what it hides he leaves imprints of his fingers where he tried to scratch it open.
Run His scrambling sets the angled bank to an arroyo crumbling downslope into earth when a jackrabbit makes stones come suddenly alive. A mesquite steps aside so he can pass from desert into sky, from where he looks down at an unexpected sound. Bright morning, coyotes back in shadows, sleeping as only fur can. It’s a reflex leap from creosote to the portals of light and a space open to receive information that has travelled through the universe to reach the startled ears that hear even sunlight as it touches the ground. Up from the gravel bed, stopping to assess the quicker way to disappear, he’s a memory before ever being seen. There is no history to slow him down, a clear path in all directions. One runs low and out of sight, one high among
the stars, and one ends where the sun is black. So run, spirit run, don’t stop to ask the way; become earth, wind and fire, nobody’s father, nobody’s son.
Everyday’s Desert First breath, the morning moon rides bareback on the mountain. Darkness shades to thrashers’ voices, the gravel tracks soak back the animals who made them. Coyote sharp, the stones are shifting to make space for light and anyone who needs to be alone today. So familiar the trail as to rest beneath the rocks, above the creosote, straight along the border between waking life and sleep. The far off peaks are blue, cloudstrings at the altitude at which stone dreams there’s a forest growing to be closer to the sky, and here underfoot shoes crunch their way to be more part of Earth. Brittlebush upslope, bright yellow, olive green, no clock to time when spring arrives. Along a single thread of trail a Roadrunner hurries, light into shade, and the shade disappears in a hollow. Where the trail stops to look up Rock wrens call high and low, give voice to formations assembled through chance. Everything else has fallen into place: mesquite, arroyos,
yesterday, the years preceding it, and all the storms the ground has ever swallowed. Now from overhead ravens caw down to say it’s good where they are, it’s desert even in the air.
Newstrail Javelina starlight on a gravel trail, here’s the way they carry news down from where desert dreams to darkness parting on the lower slopes. On scented nights there is a path to follow lined with ants and prickly pear, the way down being easy to the hoof when the land rolls gently underneath each step. So peacefully the rocks rest in positions they have been assigned. The earth lies back with one eye open. Soft clouds overhead, sharp moon, noses to the stony way from higher ground to low, bearing an account of how tranquil the world could have been. It’s the hour negotiations are on hold, convenience stores that stay open twenty-four hours to service a nervous city glow from their chilly cold case hearts, the word progress lies awake and imagines it could mean improvement. Slowly,
slowly, bite into a cactus pad, chew thorns, body weight and light of step, become witnesses without the words to tell what witness sees.
Belonging Wings locked for pace, a hawk glides through the cloudy light and wheels around, back high enough to view the dry, the cracked, the wrinkled desert whose rocks tumble until they have no energy to continue and stop to wait for brittlebush to yellow in between them. The ground here swallows time. Run, shadow, run, burrow down into the past, leave a trail of silence for the animals to follow. Sun balanced on a fingertip, directions converge, one god and many beetles, or one beetle which history will make a god. All the same to the hawk, javelina, or the soul wandering in search of a body to guide it home. Let it find where it belongs; a narrow cave vacated by coyotes or a crevice on the slope from which
all tracks are visible, even those raccoons leave on their way down from the stars.
Clear Day Sunday blue from Four Peaks south, shadows soak into the mountain and late sunlight clings to outward reaching slopes. One step for javelinas, one for the raccoon and it’s time to pack the view away, turn back with one more pocketful of truth, with thanks to the arroyo, the easy way the mountain leans on five o’clock preparing for the night to awaken. There’s quiet justice in the rise and fall of the terrain, cavities to sleep and hide in, narrow space for rain to run and open space for hawks to fly above. No deception to be seen for miles. A dollar here can’t buy a gust of wind. It’s honest land. When an owl or coyote makes a kill the rocks don’t feel a thing.
Cloudcover Low hanging doubt at the ridgeline, tectonic pressure ten million years into the earth, but time doesn’t stop to look back at itself. The wrens on the boulders have been there since beetles found their way out from the ground and desert chose as its day of rest one with mockingbirds singing where the sun should have been. Palo verde limbs fallen but branches still hungry reach through them to be green again. And the saguaro fallen several summers deep starts purpling when javelinas
have eaten through the seasons to expose the core. Cloudcover still uncertain, the layers of desert are stacked between sky and decay. Even the tangled dead roots of mesquite won’t let go of the light.