Whether you call her Gaea, the Earth, Mother, the Big Lonesome or the Land, I have long felt a deep attachment to that on which we live, thrive and expire. To me, the mountains are Mother's stretch marks, the rivers are both her tears and her nourishment, while the oceans are her deep reservoir of lifeweb essences.


LUCERNE VALLEY

Nine thousand years ago
your playa lakes dried up,
the pinyon and juniper trees on your rocky hills
withered away,
and your beach sand became home to
brine shrimp.
In suspended sleep they yet dream,
remembering
when tulie stems sprang up like green grasshoppers,
the day's turquoise blue sky still dawned
friendly and cool,
and ducks chattered nearby in marshy coves,
debating whether newcomer man
might yet become
a good neighbor.

--by T. Jackson King, Xizquil 13, Summer 1995.


CAPULIN VOLCANO

Stopped on the high east rim
of Johnson Mesa,
you see golden grasslands
caressing
volcano country.

A place where buffalo died
long ago, near Folsom,
so men could eat,
women might rest awhile,
and children could play hide and seek
among the cutbank arroyos.

A place where white fossil bones
first taught pioneer America about stones,
and extinction.
Bison antiquus still speaks
in the bated growl
of Capulin Volcano,
its last roar
just ten thousand years ago.

The rusty red cinder cones
poke up through the bones
covered by golden grasslands,
lumieres ever ready
to torch
hubris human.

--T. Jackson King, 1996


THE TREES NEAR PROSPECT

Traveling north to Amon-Ra,
one passes through a stately retinue
of cloud-touching black spruce tress.
Their posture so upright,
their heavenly aim so bright,
one justly wonders
if they are cousins Egyptian
to the stately columns at Karnak.

For each does provide
a corridor wide
for our pilgrimage to the gods
mortal
and immortal.

Passing through the wooden cleft
left behind by man's stony ribbon
of asphalt Ethiopian black,
one cannot but wonder
if Karnak's roof of stones,
once carried upon the River Nile,
could ever be so fine
as the open sky
of cerulean blue tile
that towers high above
the trees near Prospect.

One suspects
the gods of Thebes
would ever be
jealous.

--T. Jackson King, 1996


SKULL VALLEY

Passing through
the dry parched throat
of Skull Valley,
one chances upon
a few white-pillared Neo-Classical homes,
their presence a shock so far away
from anywhere.

A bit threadbare
and abandoned they seem,
though they call themselves the dream
of Iosepa.
It is a Biblical place
well-suited to cattle-herding
amidst the sandy wastelands
of sagebrush and saltweed,
a memoried place shared quietly with Indian lands.

Seems fit somehow--
the Mormon Saints build homes
from another time,
while the Goshute Indians
lease their land to engineers
who blow up rocket engines
in Skull Valley.

--T. Jackson King, July 1994


ALKALI RIDGE

I

Mountains are the Land breathing deep.
Deserts are a mother's patience,
endless, and forever free.
Together they are force of spirit writ large.
Though you might never know it sitting atop
Alkali Ridge.

That is a place of yellow soil hotter than the Sun's backside,
a place in the Mohave Desert rarely touched by the outside.
A hunkering down spot, austere, calm and deadly.
Sitting atop Alkali Ridge
one bets on which scorpion will make it across that hot vale
alive.
Brown husks foretell its ancestral fate.

Even here the Land breathes,
though mostly at night.
Coolness brings a gasping indrawn breath
and the survivors of the white hot day
lurch around frenziedly,
hungry for dinner, famished really, for not long after Moon-rise
comes the Sun
and neighborly death.

II

The Mesa Verdes, now, they welcome you.
With a green smile, a soft sloping embrace,
and a red rock patience
they make you welcome.
Yet their whispers drive men mad,
and break the legs of horses.

Like the footstools of God they rise to the sky,
flat-topped, stately and riven with ravines
guaranteed to surpass the Cretan labyrinth.
Perhaps it is their smooth jade blanket
of pinyon and juniper
that bewitches man, woman and beast.
But if one listens closely to the whispers,
and deciphers their archaic tongue,
water seeps and tinaja pools
give comfort, rest and life.

Resting, you discover the Anasazi Dream
of hearth, home and love,
of corn, beans and squash,
lived to the full measure even as the Land took away
her weeping rains.
Perhaps for some transgression mean,
perhaps for that perennial sin of man--
hubris that we think we live
without the kiss of mountain and desert.
Folly, folly, and blindness eternal.

III

Close by the serpentine Green River lies
a place of banded red rock and brown arches,
where Wind disputed with Land
and voices left their touch
in red rock buttes carved ornately.
Like a dowager's hair coiffed
for the Emperor's surmise,
one fossil outlasting another.

Nearby lie the broken guts of Land's rocky heart,
torn open by the River's kiss,
its languid flow a match for any fossil,
any argument,
for it drowns them all, one and many,
in wetness democratic, perennial
and merciless.

Thus do Mountains kiss the Desert,
and River quenches the Land's thirst
for vitality mortal.

--T. Jackson King, July 1994


Copyright retained by T. Jackson King 2009