Don Gray
Art Essays, Art Criticism & Poems
Arizona Desert Rain...A PoemSolemn, solemn is the world. Rocks and trees deep-rooted stand, fixed in broad and buxom earth, twist and spread of limb and girth in slanting, pouring rain. Wind shakes the trees in ruffled stance like misbehavior shoulder-grasped. Lightning breaks, streaks earth and sky, sheet metal tearing in a hurricane. Atmosphere thick, become opaque, slashing rain and pelting hail scribe the breadth and depth of air in diagonal wild display. Pocked and wrinkled water pools the brown and tawny grit in unaccustomed moisture sheen, the desert never much like this; colors rich and sodden green. Palo verde trees, mesquite, twisted by pressuring life and death, fair days and foul, staunchly unperturbed by blanching rain. Greasewood heavy-laden with blueberries of light that drip and fall in harvest lush and ripe. Great drops ride the prickly pear like roller coasters upside down, horses' saddles fallen under, liquid tumors swollen large that fall and burst upon the ground; balloons aimed by bomb-sight kids from second story windows. The long rain ends, and rivulets course the yard as larger washes rage and roar, carve the desert sand. The woodpecker's clarion call duets with distant tractor in cold air cleansed by recent rain. Wind-whipped clouds like great black lids reflect in grey-brown mirrors strewn the length of desert path my black dog ripples with her tongue. Trails left by rushing waters seem mile-wide deltas viewed eye-high, black with iron ore dark as dog whose claw-punched prints set right the scale of tiny flows that minor rut to desert depths. Bright, bright sky-filled light, sun-scribed sparrow on a barbed-wire fence; two javelina, shining hackles rise, stand splay-footed, flat-nose test the wind. Quartz gleams dazzle in glittering sand; the thrasher's whistled succulence, a juicy morsel well tasted. The sun, a fiery, shattered orb, destroys the black saguaro. Copyright by Don Gray
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