What

In the arroyo, I pass a magnet over sand, drawing slivers of iron until the magnet becomes a black chrysanthemum. Nothing pins me to language and language pins me to nothing. Nothing in the creekbed. The sky. Its blank stare. Its blue forehead. Its tongue hanging. Sometimes beauty is a debilitating thing. The woman moving among her children. The steady cool welcome and deflection. A beauty that could tear you down with a look. Sometimes beauty is the last thing you want. O lord of the imperious glance. Of mystery and dust. Lord of all things that shimmer in first light. Of railroad tracks and broken bottles. Lord of window and glint. Of the cardinal's bright call. Stirring memories that begin as a shudder, a flickering in a thicket. But what if we did not speak of memories? The trees assemble from darkness, the dead branches first. It starts as a wave. Then a particle. Then a wave. The key is then. The key is Who is looking? And for what? The obsidian raven, neck thickening for the cruk, cruk. The russet hawk on the mile marker. Hill after hill of shimmering grasses. Sometimes the most powerful words are the unspoken ones. Words pitched like sunlight slashing across a slalom of hillside daffodils. Description is an attempt to cast words onto the page like paint. But color lives a meaningless lifetime until someone remembers the landfill awash with violet in Van Gogh light: Asters scattered by wind and birds. Sunlight like a host's up-facing palm. All this is yours until you cease to regard the world with equanimity. With astonishment. A child under a willow. A willow under a sky. A sky under what.