RHIZOMES.

There was a tree, then it died, now it’s gone.
Half gone.
Glimmering in the arid light like a mirror in the breeze.
The Flat was bombed from underground. Though the shattering atoms could not rock the desert dead,
the roots of the yucca palms ran deep. Dig a well in Yucca Flats and you may find water, but it hums with
an energy unfit for consumption.
Murder is a particle and a wave and a poison. Once split, it devastates. No corpus emerges unchanged.
Alexander trembled; there were worlds still left to conquer.
It rained the day she died.

PRODOXIDAE.

The moths led me here. White as snow and quivering in the heat, they rise from the ground like the
unquiet dead.
Most would not follow where the small ghosts lead, but I have needs & must wander & be lost.
There are angels if we had the will to see them:
Wait in a blackening parlor, one lamp’s yellow light weak as a whisper in your eyes.
The eidolon alights upon your open window screen, wings wide & small.
Hang your vision on the fragile glow of the moment.
Close your eyes and look—the afterimage blooms crucified in the unlight.
It hangs on its own wings, having suffered & died.
Cushionhearted & uncompromised.
The moths lead me here.

BREVIFOLIA.

On the margin of the flatland there is a furrow. There, the earth is broken like a promise. No longer
growing there, a tree that is not once was.
The oldest tree in Yucca Flats outlived man’s many heroes.
Even as Alexander wept, she lived.
Her roots gripped the earth like an iron fist. She had no velvet glove, she was serrated.
Desert dagger. Ancient knife in a world of gunfights.
She died ignobly:
Poisoned by proximity as mankind punched a hole through a microscope.
The hubris to think that a man can make a ghost.
That our footprint in the firmament could be so deep and creased that the world would refuse to forget
& insist we leave a shadow behind to be remembered by.
Alexander does not even haunt us; Ozymandias lays legless underground. The sand still swims around
him, grating its whisper, forbidding him to speak, saying only
Shhhhhhhhhhh.

MUTUALISM.

She haunts us still.
The yucca palm permits only the moths.
They trade their young like changelings:
The moth pollenates,
the yucca flower holds their eggs like a jewel.
She fed more moths in her lifetime than there are men on the earth.
And all of them, all of them—
It rains the day I follow the moths.
They flit between the raindrops, which are thick and hungry for the thirsty earth. Each kisses the land
like an exaltation, whispering man’s own words back to us, newly fertilized by truth:
The Godhead is broken like bread, we are the pieces.
There is a moth refracted, held in every raindrop.
Centuries of moths; no path but to follow them
to her.
There is no tree there now, though you can see her silhouette in the rain. As if the weather has not yet
realized she is lost.
How do you mourn forever when it dies?
Here the earth still yearns for an answer and it asks and it asks
There are so many moths. Eons of moths. I have never been inside a cloud before.
I will die here, but not like she did.
What will be left, I wonder, when the rain stops.