January 2021.
Dear--.
Year of fire, year of snow.
Flakes loose as cotton balls drifting down
into our desolation.
Chollas collapsing, mesquites going copper
and brittle after months without rain.
The rainy seasons dwindling.
I've been reading about fidelity to the land.
Today's consumer economy trains us to be
discontented and ungrateful.
Never did I think to water the agaves
until I saw them nearly dead.
They can't stand the heat and drought anymore.
The people I love, for their love of this land, who
have said, they are leaving soon, moving north to places
the rain hasn't yet abandoned.
Just a month ago, one of them told me
about a red-tailed hawk sailing like a dream
above the Santa Cruz.
Doubled in the wastewater.
Doubled in the water flowing once again.
Treated wastewater, true.
But life doesn't care.
Accepting what we return to it.
When I think back to that New Year's night,
we walked out from your front porch
in Penns Valley along the Mill Race in Pennsylvania.
Stars sharp as flung sand in that ridge-cradled sky.
I think I could leave in a moment to return to it.
But here I am on the street in Tucson
where my neighbors were born and remained
to the third generation.
And I'm furious about one neighbor's hoarded trash,
another's yard swept lifeless and bare in glaring sunlight.
Oleander standing guard for neighbors I never see.
But we sit together all these nights so much
nearer than to anyone else.
Breathing in the half darkness, dreaming.