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Mid-morning. The hummingbirds out before the sun rose singing ruby throated songs flitting from tree to tree with the unmistakable humm have disappeared and the cicadas at center stage, their hearts ignited by the sun's heat rub their feet together so vigorously all other sounds fade, even the chain saws have stopped. In this non-silence cicada-song amplifies into a single white note a hallucination in the blinding light. Yesterday I complained of the saws and compressors, all that energy bouncing off the bare mountain bare beneath the dead trees towering in their charred splendor remnants of a forest burned in a tidal wave of fire. The cicadas hover above the new growth a river of oaks, oh so many even the old paths are washed away. The counterpoint of lush green growth and stiletto black stalks of Ponderosas is a cacophony of life and death broken by a butterfly, a monarch, yellow and black with her elegant flutter floating in between, the dead branches of the pinons a white calligraphy against the mountain's curve. |
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Issue #7, February, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.