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The Heartroots in the bitternessof this ground; it spreads out the web of its hair, the fine net of its rootlets, an inch deep in every direction, to live upon infrequent rain. It opens its armored buds and is pollinated for only one night-- a riot of sweetness--tongued by a brood of migrating bats. At noon, its perplexed shape nests in the skeletal core of the perished giant. It steers always in the same direction. Its tongue keeps worrying or trying to heal the tiny sore inside its mouth. It mocks the sentiment, driving past the feathered sign tacked up along the road. It is always flying onward, away to the underbelly of the world. It is opening useless wings within me. It hopes to envelope its children in some haze or halo of guardian angel. It hopes to survive the gaze of the mythic quetzal, the lacerating beak of the macaw. It is just another voiceless herald flagging in the terrible heat, running up and down the rivers running between the heavens and the underworld, racing on the roads that still belong to the Lords of Fever, Pus, Pestilence. No matter how little it rains, how prolonged the drought, even when it cannot afford leaves, it blossoms... All those multiple yellows that hummingbirds and bat are drawn to, sinking their heads into the nectar, the unfailing sweetness of the heart. |
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Issue #11, September, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.