The View from Mt. Baldy
Just see how the baby blue eyes blink felicitously, knowing full well their days are briefly numbered and that, being small as sequins, only the carpenter ants
will shoulder them aside.
Spring sun flatters itself now;
it falls askance on golden wall flowers, on Indian paintbrush, on orange clumps of monkey flowers that surprise
the canyon walls where April's icicles have left behind candle-dripped stains that bleed brightly through the ore. Sunset Peak and Telegraph Mountain, and all the attendant ridges of granite, snag themselves on lake-sized clouds;
their power is like the musculature of time, a tale of erosions, tremors, the desire
to preside, to grow out of finite form
into infinite abstraction. And,
like a procession of white-robed pilgrims, the yuccas climb the crumbling terraces that burgeon with wild lavender and pinon, indifferent to perfection, though it is theirs, as they ignite the mountain meadows,
their huge white bells swinging slightly above great orbs of spears, a halo of bees and beetles floating above them like smoke.
