Wilderness Interface Zone

When the bobcat
flashed angrily through
the headlights
of Alan’s famous
Mustang,
we sliced the
silence to a primitive
stop and wild
eyed,
grabbed the
.22s resting cold and
anxious on
the back seat
Like
hunting hawks
dove
from the car
wings folded
The canyon echoed the crack
crack, crack as we fired
at shadows
We didn’t know then,
the cat
could
have cured us
and the quiet Spring night
soothed
our burning
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To read more of Steve’s poetry and see his bio, [...]

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‘Another Kane Gulch spring scene.

Warming rays over frost kissed flowers
Bids cold love depart into a smiling sun,
Enticed thereby to air and cloudy bowers
Where icy winds and snow have lately run.
An earth in step with brimming clouds above
Renews a onetime halted suitor’s dance,
Accepting rain’s entreating poet’s love,
Penned once again in arcing rainbow’s glance.
Cold voices from this blanket world rise up
To [...]

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Spring with spines.

Palm hands
applaud the wind
that brings
lost cloud ships
slowing
to toss extra weight overboard
Rocky hills
blush green from
unexpected rain
Shy poppies
bloom
in spite of themselves.
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To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here, here, and here.
*contest entry*

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Engelmann’s hedgehog cactus (I think) in spring a.m. light.  Engelmann managed to have a lot of desert plants named after him.

She painted herself
into the landscape. On
a canvas she had
magicked from deep-self,
April sunlight streamed
from the clouds
in spectacular, uncanny, rays—
immaterial matter,
soul stuff made flesh.
She brought it to her
father who pointed out
how she should have
painted the sunbeams with
more yellow—
pointing to a maudlin
mountain scene,
hung ceremoniously on
a well-manicured wall—
an oil anyone could have techniqued
with hackneyed accuracy. That’s
how it should be [...]

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It glows!

Beneath the ramble and catch
of tumbleweed: the lull of horizon
delicious with distance and elegy,
dead-ends and blue highways hoarse
with the whisper of wind, dust,
wood, bone, memory—the grist
of solitude stirred up
the morning you woke determined
to pluck the sun from God’s thigh
as he passed, full-stride,
over this side of town. That’s
how Jacob got new-named, you say
when the story comes [...]

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This photo was taken in the Kane Gulch, Utah back country, but these flowers grow wild in our yard, too.