A Rose for My Friend in the City on the Coming Birth of His Child

My friend, chronicler of urban anxiety,
teller of tales of steel speeding through tunnels,
to you I send this metaphor from the Mohave,
from the open places where one's voice is a chorus,
where one's footfall is like a thunder of hammers;
here, where the sun is massive and merciless,
I stand among a trillion upon a trillion
grains of dust, to tell you of these magics:
flick of the scorpion's tail, coyote's joyous cry,
moonlight sharp as the edge of a killing knife
which Mother Night, in her infinite tenderness,
lays down upon the world like a cool silk sheet.

I hold these things like gifts in open palms, for you
to take and turn in your own hands, as Eve did once,
with a creature at her ear, whispering falsehoods.
But I give you no falsehoods. I give you solid
sincerities baked in a sun as close as a kiss,
hard hills of stone with sparse and twisted growths,
steep chocolate colored spires that burn like candles
in summer's relentless fire; I give you waters bluer
than the veins under the skin of a child's wrist,
flecked with white froth, churned by the wind's tumult;
but more than anything, I give you space:
space to lie down, to learn the value of silence;
to roll and laugh, and to be the child you once were;
to run like your child, who even as we speak
is at peace, who is blooming there, like this desert rose.


mid 90's