This was a Forest Once

and the land remembers, its bitterness distilled in the snap of a sage leaf: sap fusing to skin, pungent, tacky blood that sticks in the vein. Did you know sage leaves grow silvered hair? To deflect, blur—the sun that feeds also burns, so violet. That’s why the desert cannot be green. It’s easy to lose one’s way in this economy of sameness, one plant, copy pasted. Then the playa, of cracked mud, salt, white-glare memory of water. It bites the eyes. What here still endures? Tools, shells, bodies, Mesozoic wood turned to stone. Stone worn down to sand. A twisted bristlecone, five-thousand years old, bleached like bone; its roots drink from a deep place we cannot know. All endures, albeit changed. Even you, even me. As I walked in that bright and desiccated place, I thought I dreamt of water, but. It was just another pool of Light: trickling, rippling, Light without