Pictures and Words from around Arizona
From the Chiricahus, Santa Ritas, San Pedro River, Organ Pipe Cactus Monument and Agassiz Peak.
Lost Hat
Forty winters soft, the hat is too comfortable and too green to leave for packrats or a fox beneath the frosty stars. First place to look is past the cattle guard, where the view back into the mountains was worth the photograph, and if not there perhaps close to the ocotillo with tire tracks curving two days old beside the road. Nothing but a shrike on a yucca stalk's tip looking straight across the prickly pear and tangled grasses, then a Crissal's thrasher shows itself before it proves how easily disappearances occur in desert. One more curve and looking at the ground is hard when the moment is so brilliant with noonlight on the pinnacles ahead, but there it is, with nowhere to hide on the wide open land.
A Summer Photograph
A ridge stands clear against the paling sky with its broken clouds that glow at the edges facing a warm day’s sun as it falls behind Baboquivari Peak. The middle ground
is ochre rounded into an ascent toward the higher slopes with oak and pine and lizards slipping into gaps in rock beside the trail that turns to air at the pinnacle. A few last calls
are sprinkled across a silence running all the way from the grasslands to Mount Wrightson where granite burns red beneath a shy moon just beginning its trajectory through night. And we
have shaken off the shadows cast upon us by the juniper where we followed the blue grosbeak back to daylight and stopped in a clearing whose moment is earth
and air framed with the texture of fire and the bare, knotted branches scratching into the dusk at the right of the scene to be remembered as it was just before the nighthawks and the stars.
After Turning off Interstate 10
Nothing casts a shadow on this road except a cloud. It’s pale dust and desert all the way. Today, there’s a wind tugging at the sky’s darkest edge and the ground dips while the view runs straight ahead
to rise into the mountains. A dry scent crosses from the Peloncillos to Whitetail Canyon and the sun burns where it can through such gaps that allow blue to flash through them
onto land that supports the most stubborn of shrubs. The air sounds like a sheet flapping, and a raven is riding each gust as it coughs out the bad news that a dust storm had formed on the freeway to the north
where traffic folded so quickly the passengers barely knew the fires they were swallowed in.
The Vermilion Cliffs
Through the residue the wind left behind after carving light into shapes that endure,
the double yellow line that leads to the edge of the world runs to the point where the sky opens for it to pass
and continues toward the stars, leaving in its wake rock stretched thin
in layers recording time back to when a sea was here,
feeling for a shore.
Leaving Portal
The road slides from under snow and away toward the frozen grasslands lying pale against clouds that have settled between the Peloncillos and the Chiricahuas, barely higher than the telegraph poles from which hawks watch the stillness before they thaw their wings and fly into the day’s breath with talons sharpened by the cold. |
To Ajo and Back
I Highway 85
A migratory flock in V formation flies across the Gila River, where the trees along its banks are pastel smoke in March
when lupines, broom and mallow line the road all the way past yet another desert lonely prison where the only movement visible
is that of swallows looping high above the sparkling razor wire.
II The Depot at Ajo
When wind combs back the grasses sprouting from the platform's cracks it's telling how the mine closed and left a wall of tailings along the edge of town
but the Cactus wrens stayed on to call from palo verdes rooted in between the tracks.
III Desert Arch
The ocotillo fan their many arms to receive the wind that blows volcanic shadows over rocks dripping from the light in rhyolite layers moulded to the shape of the Earth
and high above them an arch has formed through which the stars flow when they follow bats into the night.
In stately descent from a clear sky the turkey vultures glide over the open pit mine, down close to the old school and the white cupola on the Catholic church, eighty wings wide above the plaza as festivities begin
and they are silence over music when they reach the eucalyptus growing next to the mortuary they have chosen for a roost.
(V Border Patrol on the Reservation
Into grass at the asphalt’s edge a roadrunner darts for cover, neck stretched forward and back as straight as the road from Why to Quitohoa. He’s gone so fast not even the agent can see
from the truck parked behind the old billboard whose lettering has flaked beyond explanation of why it is there.
VI Reservation Spring
In a land whose rivers are dry wildflowers flow from shrine to shrine and spring to spring; from needles filled with light on the cholla to a mine cut from a mountainside.
Reservation Vista
Through the days of March and mallow, power poles lead from mesquite to the mound with a tank painted white, behind which the peak that is sacred to those who drink the water touches the highest point in many lifetimes. Raven calls travel farthest here, across the saguaro studded hill and away toward the border where a man who wants not to be seen might slip quick as a lizard between green shadows. But to disappear completely and to leave no trace requires imagination such as the mockingbird displays by the infinite variety of songs it sends in all directions pretending to be anything except itself while remaining so familiar nobody notices when it tips back its head and pours the notes out in a stream that runs directly to the sun.
Reservation Time
A pickup truck moves faster than history in these wildflower days along a road through country that remembers the jaguar and ocelot. It has somewhere to be,
a future to reach before summer, with a full tank of gas and no time to pull over and look
at what the first priests saw when they stopped with tiny stones in their sandals to bless each plant before they knew its name
to catalog and claim it for eternity. |
Late Road
Walking the road in the oak and juniper light of late afternoon we go quietly beneath the wings of descending vultures who have cleansed the world’s bone to bare white.
On Both Sides
On the other side of the hill someone is planning a mine that will hollow out the earth while on this side a Canyon wren is hiding in the wood pile set aside for winter. On the other side
of the hill, uniformed men patrol the arroyos to search for the poor who have travelled a long way from home and a river is wrung dry by a handshake. But
this side is where commerce is suspended while orioles come to feed. On the other side, farther away, are cities paved with unrest; on this side
anyone is welcome to sit down in the company of jays and woodpeckers, for whom there is only this side of the hill, knowing nothing about the other side and the treaties that were broken there.
Texas Canyon
These rocks appear not to have been awakened for centuries. They balance on each other and lean against the wind with the distinction of being smooth in rough country. Heavy trucks and fast cars pass constantly while they never break formation. When the land surrounding them is tired from drought they hold a pose to display virtuosity and endurance. They are the last break in a journey nine hours from Los Angeles, fifty million years from magma pushing out of darkness, three hours with a cold drink to Las Cruces.
A Yard in Ajo, Early Morning
These things astonish me beyond words - William Carlos Williams
Drops of finch-red balance on the power line dipping above the alley to the west, while quail attentively investigate the ground they cross to reach the yard whose desert willow casts morning shade across agave soon to bloom. An ant smaller than the letters moves across a page of William Carlos Williams open to words generously spaced to let them pass. Cactus wrens chortle in the oleander. Doves who introduced themselves from far away fly to pole-tops and proclaim their presence there. Between flecks of light on bark a lizard descends, then bends and straightens his forelegs to raise his eight-inch torso above stones, and away from light a Bronzed cowbird’s red eye buttons the shadows down.
River Weather
White smoke rises from the shoulder of a mountain embedded in a rain-dark sky, below which a freight train carries stormlight across the open land.
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With stars above the river, mice in the grass and toads on the stones, a mantis glides across a bed of insect sounds.
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While the gods roll dice behind the clouds, dark water turns on its bed and the surface shadows become a heron’s wing.
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There’s a feral sky above the ghost town site where Black-throated sparrows fly into and out of the thundering grass. |
From Agassiz Peak
From eleven thousand feet the shadows cast by clouds rock back and forth as they float down through volcanic light to the forests where they break apart between the pines and disappear into late summer grass.
Windgusts at that altitude slide from a raptor’s wing and dissolve in thin air while the view from the treeline runs sky-wide and frost-bright to the point where Earth and rain pale into each other.
A misplaced glance would slip back a thousand years to be swallowed by lava and leave no foothold on the crater’s edge.
Prairies tumble, edge over edge, while forests tighten their grip against winter, which begins its descent from the first aspen leaf to turn yellow.
Highway 85
A desert prison lies at rest beneath sweeps of light that break through changing clouds on the day after rain and wet shadows cling to the rock formations on the bright side of the highway as sun picks out remaining pools and vegetation stripped to its winter core on land pulling free from a harrier’s grip.
Alamo Canyon
Sky sails through the open roof to a long abandoned house,
pulling as it rises organ pipe, saguaro, creosote,
and cholla to the thumb of rock impressing
itself on the cool blue light spread wide across January’s
rain scented desert all the way along the trail
to an old corral whose fences have surrendered
to mesquite and brittlebush and the wind coming down
to the stones in the creek with hollows the Indians had made
after grinding the last of their beans into flour
while the thrashers kept singing in the space they left behind.
January Light I Inside the cholla’s many branches green withholds its secrets and such drops of moisture as they have absorbed from recent rain
while its needles are sharpened by a glow suggesting softness, even as they scratch the light that passes through them.
II When sun hits the peak it takes hold and raises it to where it hovers with the desert still below. The shadow draped
from its darker side runs down toward the earth with gravity’s weight to propel it.
III Where a shadow’s edge touches illuminated rock a ripple occurs in time’s fault line.
IV A clear sky’s wind blows light across a canyon
where a bright trail winds towards the final descent
into a creek that swallows it and feels its way in the dark.
V These are the unmarked paths for those who cross the border in the dark. Illusions grow here
with shallow roots. They are always as close as a shadow to the light that creates it. |
Departure
A desert ridge is a wash of dreamstone across clear sky. Before it are saguaros standing in the backlight that grants each one an aura. Whoever lived here in the time before the days had hours knelt patiently and worked until the winter sun was low and they rose and walked away, each one a darkness edged with fire that moved as people do when leaving history behind them.
Landscape with Observatory
Ocotillo brush the line along a dry ridge. From the highest peak visible a telescope is focused on infinity. A dirt road rises to the altitude juniper take root. The sky is open. A yucca stalk leans to almost fallen. Sparrows call all the way down to the church where the wind blows in Spanish: black robe to gray robe, granite to grass.
Night Ride to the Desert’s Heart
After city’s end where the last mall shines like sunset in a box the nighthawks rise into the gap between day and night. The highway enters darkness, swallowing all who drive along it, pulse and roar running down to a hum at dreampace past the full moon rolling from between two ridges and ascending in time with a coyote’s silver call.
Scenic Drive
The road curls out of a small town and climbs the rocks that overlook the churches and plaza lying fifty years below. Cactus columns green into the sky,
fine stones curve toward volcanic shapes containing sound that never shall be heard again. A few signs remain
that somebody was here in another life: the ruins once inhabited, the tank that held a season’s water, and beyond them the tailings dam
banked against sunlight. Lizards have dominion on the dry slope where they breathe for the stones
and the drive descends to join the highway with two-way traffic speeding in one-way time.
Organ Pipe Checkpoint
When the officer asks Are you a citizen? the answer isn’t easy to articulate. It’s been eleven thousand years since the ice cap receded for mesquite to grow here, and six thousand five hundred later the Organ pipe appeared. The oldest mountains have been worn down to what they are by sixty million years of weather while the plates beneath them shifted. It all made a place where the Cactus wrens could nest among thorns and scrape against silence with their calls. There’s a green light today growing out from where the earth cracks. Every vista here ends long ago, too far away for anyone to call it home.
For the Raven
The stone light on a slow road runs straight past a raven who bounces from a fence post with a bone held shining in his beak. |
Dawn to Dusk
The shadow cast at first light slides into the gap between the two white rock formations below Silver Peak where junipers and oaks absorb it. Hours flow downslope while grosbeaks sing in the ash tree and the slowly circling vultures rise toward noon. Lizards' minutes run across the rocks as time drips deeper into the mineshafts whose mouths open among sparrows and scrub. Sit a while in the yard among oranges where tanagers come to feed until the mountain glows as if the light comes from inside it, before the calm snaps when the skunk grubbing for insects with his tail held signal high runs between your legs as you manage to grab hold of the dog intent on chasing it.
Lost and Found
when the road forked they took both ways Richard Shelton
There are no wrong roads on dry earth where far off mountains stretch along the hazy skyline and greenery is sparse beneath the Swainson’s hawk looking out from a telegraph pole with a warm wind in his coverts.
A suede glow reaches each horizon, with dust enough for the sunlight to soak into air as it streams down. Along the way
are ruins whose walls hold up the sky, and the remnants of journeys that paused for more fuel at the pumps casting empty shadows. Destinations
aren’t important where ravens call which direction to take, one for each point of the compass in a country without rivers or signposts.
From the Ben Lilly Lookout
Trogon or turkey? The deep call rises from the forest below to the lookout rocks, where a metal plaque pays tribute to Ben Lilly who killed the last wild grizzly in the Gila Wilderness and too many lions for counting. If a trogon, then surely the first here on record. The ones he didn’t shoot he killed with a knife whose blade was a vicious curve. In Lilly’s day God called upon his kind to cull the numbers, and he worked as well for government as for a man with time and money to spend on tracking down a bear whose size set him up for sport. Listening carefully the call comes two notes at a time, suggesting trogon. But here? Ben Lilly slept in tree boughs, ate cougar meat, earned seventy-five dollars a month to hunt and trap in Arizona, and brought extinction close enough to touch. A turkey is no surprise, even though the rarity would make a better story: a bird worth waiting hours for, just to see the flash of red and know it lives against whatever odds the age has set against it.
Circling Patagonia
The hills after rain have greened from the wild cotton scattered across them to the ocotillo reaching
from buckled slopes toward the light drenched clouds above the Santa Ritas. Tsp, chip,
wichety, and a rattle in the cottonwoods. Whit whitwhitwhit and water
chattering in the creek beneath softly hissing leaves; k-k-k-k and a Caw where riparian light and thunder
intersect. At a warm day's end shadows circle down from a clear sky to rest on trees
whose roots draw time from beneath them while kingbirds high and bright by setting sun loop into the insect air. |
