Claire Parker
One of these mornings I’ll wake up alone
I’ll go back home and taste the Black Sage
and the Sagebrush
SPACE
Where the air is dry and the desert’s cold
at night. On the ridge, the coyotes call
& I find their scat everywhere, full of Manzanita berries and hair
The Live Oaks grow wide here and not so tall, with the Black Sage and the Sagebrush
SPACE
The Buckwheat and Toyon and Coyotebrush
Chamise & small rabbits and the ghost miners’ rust
Arroyo willow, Black cottonwood, Sycamore stream
Arundo donax, that much smited reed
Water hemlock and Primrose and Trefoil, Plantain footprints following me Woodrose leaves yellowing like a broken promise
California brittlebush & Parish goldeneye & Devil’s goldenbush make up the flowering bones, showing through the skin of this graybrown place
Spectacular penstemon, my enthusiasm cannot be contained
Manyflower marshpennywort, wet feet & tiny
with their grandiose name
Lemonade sumac, Laurel sumac, fire scars in the tree rings and the Black Sage and the Sagebrush
SPACE
White Sage, elder sibling, glowing & rare,
witness to all that has passed
Rabbit tobacco, soft velvet &
white smoke, coarse fur & lucky feet
Sticky monkeyflower, bending towards me,
magnetic tenacity
White snakeroot & Desert starvine bring teeth & twilight
on tender green leaves
And the Chaparral mallow & Desertbroom,
hedge between my nervous heartbeat
and the great mess beyond
Opuntia & Cholla & Yucca, spikes in their names
conjuring the protection that I hold around my chest,
to breathe the Black Sage
and the Sagebrush
SPACE
North fortune, South fortune, river Mugwort’s dream crumbling staircase and grinding stones between I jumped over a rattlesnake here once
I cried up this mountain once
My mind left me here once
to be tended by the clouds & rocks
and the Black Sage
and the Sagebrush
SPACE