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In Scorching Time |
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| Note how the desert takes form, easily as wax. It
moves with light, and also with whatever on or above the surface has scale or wing or claw. There are shadows and impressions, then, from vulture, lizard and toad. And big cactuses that seem firm as thoughts do in the head's acre (and just as thorny): if you draw closer you will find that, far from solid, this one is riddled with sockets, with eyes of small birds that roost in a castle defended by spikes, complete with turrets and spires. |
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And of the sand--let me tell you how it swings in tides so slow they defeat the mind, great hinges of gravity for a door you expect to be pulled open to reveal within. And how one seed hard and round, caught in the undulations here, may wait one hundred brown-edged years for rain. |
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Yes, but I wanted to say more about the seeds, how the seeds of all things, if they stay anywhere, rest here. For often when I slept in the desert, I would dream of a sky like this, but of a different substance, and of sand whose image always shimmered in the moon, beyond this sand, and then, on waking, I still partly held those other visions, like shadows of the day's true marrow, before fire spread in the brass sky and burned up the residue like cobwebs. |
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Seeds, that was what I wanted to tell you of, how the one wet trigger during as many years as would make three of my lives to date, reduces that encapsulated patience to nothing (which was nothing all along anyway, lost even to the hawk's superb eye), except, perhaps, as an image of some past state which stubbornly clings between the roots and branches of the growing network, something that struggles to hold life in the gaps of ours, and that someday, when the sands turn over, will resume sway. |
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