Nocturne Chinle Strata
An immense, rainbow colored intaglio
—Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
A small cloud hangs above the mesa
Shadows crawl down the escarpment
La Tierra turns
and afternoon slides toward dusk
Sage brush winds
cool the evening air
A day passes into week
month, year, century, millennium, eon
Pangea splits into continents
which float, collide, grind, erupt
Sierras thrust against the sky
wash to the seas
Civilizations spawn, rise
fall into blackbird gurgle
The desert glistens under a quarter moon
dangling like a question mark
Spring Storm Alone
Ode for Walpurgis Night
—after Mussorgsky
Demonic winds howl
and shake their locks
Gnarled cumulus fists
float like nightmare,
clutching slivers of lightning
A sift of thunder chokes a small canyon
with the leakage
of a shrill echo
The swelling sky flares,
a sacrificial angus bull’s nostrils
sucking wind,
nose ring tethered to Factory Butte,
its angry pull loosening
every chink and buttress
in the bajada scaffolding
Sand flays the cuesta
in small, sharp bursts
scuttling into hollows,
out and around fins
like an enraged Chihuahua
snarling and snapping
searching to confront any object
perceived as affront or impediment,
at every turn screaming in triumph
* * *
A rumble,
the cloud flings its arms outward,
sheets of rain
with a rich man’s love
only for a possession
pound the desert
in a fusillade
scars of stones
scoured and slashed
in the black drench
Storm dips then pours itself
a devil’s tithing
Arroyos rumble with slurry
pellets of rock, grit, fine sand,
a swaddling permeation of red dust
fill the badlands
The bellow of lightning
freed from the mildewed
crevice of underworld
frames an out of place ocotillo
clawing the air like a forsworn proselyte
caught in the wind shear
between fact and opinion,
bloodied fingers sluing in freefall
* * *
The sudden break
moan as an eddy of wind
sieves through a sandstone breech
gurgle and croak of moving water
soft thunder
like draft horses
moving in night stalls
fat clouds, farrowed,
hover
The desert shimmers
with the glisten
of a spit shined enigma
unencumbered
from a loose pocket of night
balanced in the open palm
of a sure fulcrum
A spadefoot toad
clinging to a pothole lip smiles,
a tiny Buddha
singing in perfect
trochaic trimeter
Aubade Paean
Fanfare for the Uncommon Man
—after Aaron Copland
A soft spot
in the cloud rips
Streamers of light
spill
glistering the buttes
until the cloudseam heals
Then the redarkening
around dawnseep
trickling through
a notch in the horizon
A pinon
stuffed with song
joyance
of white-crowned sparrows
A crepitant windchime
erupts
into a geyser
of quarter notes
filling the sky
Glory
—for Leslie Norris