Dear Millennium, A Vision in the Xeriscape
Outdoors in my sun-blasted xeriscape, a sapling
shivers with memories of green rain, greenery
of jade dishes, of scallion chins afloat in a bowl
of seaweed miso-broth, of uranium milk glass
flashing in black light, of fruiting olives finning
silver, fanned sage-leaf over bleached feathergrass
where bees enflesh their bold, brassy honeycombs –
in this margin of humid compost under a fig tree
whose blossoming is stark – a fig tree is one fig,
a shining corpus of butter oil, a solo lamp glows
over sun-tolerant, unbudded apple ice crossing,
moistening hot salt-river stones. Honey floats
on a wick of waxed liquid, veiled old sweetness
ornamenting this haze. Why should a drought
unfold as a mere dispossession of plenty? Light
pools a newness of fields not yet green-green,
scorched, stern as an ancient, dry-eyed prophet
shepherding desert exiles in the Old Testament
waiting for a staff to blossom or go ophidian,
armed neither with stone nor staff to cast first,
nor any sign of deliverance
into a promised land, not yet.
