On to July
Songs of the desert
It is a patient template, quiet / Brief rustle of the wind / Perks my ears in the expanse
When the morning is beginning and the light still changing / I can turn my face toward the branches of the Palo and feel hope, or love, or contentment / flooding in
When we shake the branches seeds rain down / On my hat, on my shoulders / On the ground and on our tarp and into our buckets / There are so many as to seem excessive, lavish / Showing off, showering us / Even here, where it is dry and quiet, I am standing in a downpour of seeds
I do not understand
And the seeds of the Palo verde are shakers with many dimensions / Rustling in their pods / Clanging against one another on the branch / On their way down / Pattering when they hit the tarp / A song we play at each tree
And when I sit in the sand of the morning / After the softer patter of Psorothamnus seeds littering my hat and thus my ears / I hear again the birds who run this wash
Calls coming from every direction / Speaking to one another and to the desert, not to me / Harmonizing without meaning to / Giving song to the clear silence, bringing tears to my eyes
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In the canal behind my house, there are doves, blackbirds, and egrets. Ducks following their mother along the strip of water. A fan palm, tall mesquite trees.
I did not notice any of this until a few weeks ago, when my shirt (which was hanging to dry) fell over the fence and landed out of my reach. I walked around my row of houses, exited the little suburb area that I usually skate around, and there I was by a drainage ditch surrounded by trash and ducks and plants and the ever-present sunshine.
I could tell immediately that, while beautiful, this was not a “natural” ecosystem. That thought has been coming up lately, how you can just tell when the plants are out of place. Cattails growing in the desert is a pretty obvious one. And sunflowers! In the bottom of an irrigation ditch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful - both aesthetically and conceptually.
A podcast that Krista and I listened to (Future Ecologies: Nature, by Design?) came up with the term “freakosystems” to describe places like this: where life is thriving despite extreme disturbance, having created a new sort of community in the face of adversity. Anyways, here are some of the beauties in the little ditch I explored:
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Call for podcast reccomendations! Want to hear other people's favs. Maybe hosts that acctually make things interesting?
<3 maya
PS! we did not acctually get poisoned by Asclepias. I am being told that was not clear. If it had any effects, they were minimal. We both just had a moment of paranoia about it ;)
