Globemallow
Year after year after year
Smooth rocks smoothened
By water and even sand in wind and even wind
Juniper scrub grew to a tree split and died
Remains as snag mostly still alive
Rodent holes take refuge in sandy soil
Beneath the globe mallow crop waiting for the seven year piñon to drop
Seeds. Many young even
Oaks in little gullies of green grass meadows hidden pond and aspen stands big
Mesatops catch the rain as if
Some rock giant has been slowly gardening
These clefts for a billion years
But groves of bright orange mallow and yellow and blue penstemon
Against the rain fingers touching the horizon, blurring the distance
And us journeying along an imperfect
Family group forged and beaten still smoking from the birth
Without a place to call home together so we wander, create traditions and stories, move onward to places never heard of
A group of young souls just born into the still smoking mud of which we feel the heat of what we were also molded from
And a rag of trash wound up in an ancient sagebrush bush that I take three stems from and show them to Todd for a sniff, stuff my
Mouth full of globemallow flowers and gain sustenance from the land and I’ll tell you
I’ve given up on meaning and instead work with how I find feelings out in places both empty and full such
Moments of presence to convey a kind of resonance that doesn’t need these words for you to come close to it
But it’s like a fire stoked by attention only and it
Goes out and everything is dark in that realm that you don’t know or see into become like
The old ones who rest in the hills gardening their patch near the piñons and living with the
Least chipmunks and the mule deer and the visitor who comes for cota from the house over
Puts his feet up by the door and stares out at the rain fingers and the mallows and the piñons and junipers and rodents and distant cities and collapse and reforming and smallnesses and bignesses and the Colorado river and the lack of water in the lakes and he sits with his friend staring out and and says only for hours: after all these years…..
Thanks for reading. Funds are tight right now so if you feel like it, throw a few dollars my way.
Globemallow