Isaiah’s Elations

I

There is nothing here except the song of flies Hovering over still pools by dangling barbed wires The sun cracking seams along wheated spires Their taupe coat combed by a wind that clarifies A brush of red beneath.  Nothing here Except that vast distance of particulates Veiling the valley in a milky blue that sets The mountains apart and freely floating there With the evergreen stubble and raphaelite folds Of their muscled face.  Nothing but dry air Milling through signs of an ancestral hold On this place: skeletal irrigation pipes rolled To a halt among rusted machines, barns without care That lie broken.  Nothing left to compare To milk and honey, for which our birthright was sold.

II

There is no joy in this new day unless We see more than what our hands hold before us The life of the still unlovely mind made flesh Its hall of mirrors, muZes the pleading chorus Of the desert.  The prophet’s metered promise Calmed the fear of burying another child Yet settlement exiled us from wild Wonder at our primal homelessness. Perhaps American Beauty never depended On deus ex machina, but foreseeing ourselves In the act of deciphering the quickening light Drawing the brilliance of these colors into sight With pencil and brush we catch what twilight saves We scratch as it bleeds before the day has ended Rootedness depends at what angle our mind reposes For there’s always been nothing here but the song of roses.