The dandelions, ditch-blown brood,
the evening snow and dew-soaked phlox,
the Brewer’s pea, the Jepson’s pea
(these, the bright eyes of the viridian fields)
in chaparral, the hillside pea and angled pea,
intensities of light and pomp
that distress the easy upswept grass.
The smack the rain plants as it smudges past
and penetrates the canvas.
The smattering on field and railroad tracks,
both hardy blooms and dainty flowers,
the judge’s house, the chicken farm,
a migratory camp, a flesh motel,
a stucco digs
where all that mitigates the August swelter
is the swamp cooler’s immutable burr,
a straggling house that draws its water
from a hard-water well and flushes out
with the help of a crude sump pump.
Before the flatland is occluded
by the staunch of light at end of day,
I wanted to be content with all its surfaces:
weed, barb, crack, rill, rise …
But every candid shoot and fulgent branch
depends upon the arteries beneath.
The houses have their siphons
and their circuit vents.
The heart—I mean the literal heart—
must rely upon its own plaqued valves;
the duodenal canal, its unremitting grumble.
The brain upon its stem,
and underneath,
a network, vast, of nerves that rationalize.
The earth’s a little harder than it was.
But I expect that it will soften soon,
voluptuous in some age hence,
because we captured it as art
the moment it was most itself:
fragile, flecked with nimbleweed,
and so alone,
it almost welcomed its own ravishment.
I was a maiden in this versicolor plain.
I watched it change.
Withstood that change, the infidelities
of light, the solar interval, the shift of time,
the shift from farm to town.
I had a man that pressed me down
into the soil. I was that man. I was that town.
They call the chicory “ragged sailors” here:
sojourners who have finally returned
and are content to see the summer to its end.
Be unafraid of what the future brings.
I will not use this particular blue again.
—for Betty Buckley