Lines To a Blue Lizard

A Sonnet for an Everyday Friend

Here is a tribute to another brilliant denizen of our house. This poem is a simple Shakespearean sonnet, accented with a lot of assonance and internal rhyme.

Spry

The lizard on my wall is turquoise blue
of a most vivid hue, save where a red
round bloom garlands his back. He hangs askew,
nose down, to creep with all four feet outspread.
His slender tail, on which the flower trails,
is tapered round his toes in a tight curl.
He’s poised as if to leap. And yet his frail
self pausing, nose extended, with his swirl
of tail and crimson flower, makes me fear
the nail that halts his long-suspended leap
will someday fail, shatter the solemn cheer
with which he peers in long delight to creep
upon my wall. We’re careful, you and I,
my smiling friend, although you are so spry.

This follows from my earlier sonnet about the gracious Timotea:

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And now, a tanka for hot nights with a not-quite-full moon..

An oblong shimmer
drips across the midnight sky
as summer strengthens.
We are so close to the sun,
even the moon is melting.

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The ghost-gray rabbit
flits across the moonlight–shhh,
silence is silver.

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At Night in the Bosque

A Touch of Faerie

The Faerie Night

Beneath Orion’s bright eyes,
beneath the ramping bear,
the bosque boasts a phantom host
with sword and spear.

The gray-sheen bushes shine
where the waning moon still gleams,
and the shadowed night burns silver-white
in mystic dreams.

The clustered kindred pause
like shadows of faerie folk:
the tumbled pear in the night–beware
of its daggered cloak!

And I–have I charm or spell?
For the desert sylvans wait,
yet their hosts stand deep where shadows creep
when the moon is late.

On the breeze their whispers fly;
I listen and glimpse and guess;
when moonlight peers through faerie spears,
I blink and bless.

Yet they’re round me one and all—
is the moon a wizard old?
For his magic grand makes an elven land.
Am I too bold?

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Three Haiku for Summer

And a Small Announcement

Low in the summer sky, night after night, there is one star that nestles between two far mountain peaks. Just east of north, it has become the star my eyes search for when I walk down to the horses at night.

I watch you, lone star;
you hang between mountain peaks,
guiding through summer.

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Although the weather cooled for several days, we’ve had only the briefest flirtation with rain—the sort that sprinkles out of a nearly cloudless patch of sky, leaving things almost as dry as they were before its arrival. In fact, I couldn’t see the rain at all; I could only feel it.

Under summer skies
invisible polka dots
of rain spot my skin.

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And one more haiku for a summer night…

Antares dancing
does not weary as I do
through the summer’s length.

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In other news, I have been working on bringing three poetry collections together in book form. Where the Sun Sings is (probably) in its final configuration, needing only an introduction and formatting. The Hillside Diaries is a combination of my earlier The Hillside Diary with the year’s worth of Midwestern poetic journal that I wrote after it; this one has also reached the formatting stage. A yet unnamed collection of sonnets—possibly The San Pedro Sonnets or Sonoran Sonnets or some such title—is proving much more recalcitrant as to sequence.

Anyway, this compilation work has taken a lot of my writing energy and time lately. I’m eager to write some longer pieces, but there is only so much I can manage!

Cheers from the edge of the Sonoran desert…

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Summer 2

Beginnings of Monsoon

Is anyone else finding it brutally hard to keep in touch and to keep writing in the current state of things? Of course, 112 F temperatures don’t help either. But unlike the horrific moral and political vortex around us, the seasons follow age-old patterns we come to know and love.

Here in the Sonoran Desert, one of those patterns is a two-part summer. The first part is the hot, suffocating weeks with no moisture—no rain and single-digit humidity. The second is the monsoon season, when the prevailing winds shift from west to east, carrying moisture from the Gulf of Mexico over the plains and mountains westward.

It is a season of erratic rainfall and wind, a time of extreme heat tempered by sudden downpours. This second summer is one of the privileges of the Sonoran Desert. Our desert ecosystems rely on it.

Just today, the winds are finally shifting. There is a change in the scents that they carry. There is a hint of far-off moisture. This tanka describes just the first glimpse of that change this morning.

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Winds have shifted south.
A puff of cloud passed over
the sun of solstice.
The blue heat of summer paused.
We dream of the distant rain.

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And here is a haiku as the stars also change.

From the Milky Way
Scorpio leaps out sideways;
snapping at June nights.

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I wrote this haiku some days ago. The sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) is a striking desert succulent that sends up an enormous bloom stalk. This year the one in our yard glories in a stalk that must be well over twelve feet high at this point. Small green and brown flowers have opened down two thirds of its stem.

The sotol stalk sways:
a thousand thousand small blooms
dusting the night sky.

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Near the Solstice

Sonnet and Tanka

As we approach the solstice, the shifting balance of night and day becomes ever more evident. Dawn is the most beautiful time of all. This sonnet is a brief glimpse from a morning earlier this week. There was already plenty of light, but the swiftly rising sun had not yet crested the mountains to the east. The amount of chatter and exuberant activity from birds and rabbits was intense.

Sunrise Moments

The dawn is gold-edged silver where it meets
the silhouettes of mountains in dark gray;
the valley’s curve begins green-glimmered day
before the brief night’s cooler breath retreats.
For in the dawn we taste the summer’s sweets:
upon this early hour no shadows prey;
in the soft gleam small birds and rabbits play
beneath unshaded boughs before earth heats
to summer day. And song is everywhere
moment by moment as the growing white
of dawn creates a ring, a rising glare
of glory and of fear where mountains’ height
just slows the sunrise, while the moments bear
it on and upward to the long day’s light.

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And then there is sunset, when the heat is just beginning to slacken, when many creatures once again slip out of their daytime shelters to explore in search of water and food. This tanka follows another desert dweller that came through the dry wash on a recent evening.

Gray-coat coyote,
sun ruddied your red-stained fur;
yet you are no fox,
swinging through brush at sundown,
scattering the summer quail.

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