Back Country

[indar]

 Back Country

Past the foot of Joshua Tree,
facing east:
Hell's Kitchen lies
marked by scatterings
of wiry creosote;
occasional shacks
inhabited by hard-bit
desert rats.

The flat-pan floor
stretches to the distance,
buttes and mountains sway
in rising shimmers.
Old Route 66 dances
on subtle undulations
that remind
this was the bottom of the ocean 

and will be again
some day.

Time compresses and expands;
the sky rolls from the west;
is burned off by the sun;
salt water will follow.

What then crawls
from the mud?
 

[indar]

Try as I might I can't get this to follow the format I intend and there is a second version that is a total snarl that appeared at the same time as my initial post.

OK one last attempt fixed it so never mind

[Tracy Mitchell]

Interesting poem, Indar.   With an assist from google, I orient this in SE California, between Lake Elsinore and Joshua Tree National Park, in the Elsinore Valley.  You present the heat, the sun, almost as characters in the poem.   “Hard-bit desert rats.”  People or rodents? The reference works on both levels. 

So I learn that Route 66 was decommissioned some years ago.  But not the lands it traversed.  I love the reference to creosote, but am puzzled by ‘wiry’ creosote.  Still, the description is of a place which outlasts its inhabitants, and outlasts even the desert rats.

The closing summons the rough beast of Yeats’ The Second Coming. 

S.4 L.2 – I wonder if there should be an ‘up’, or ‘down’, or ‘on’, or ‘across’ following ‘rolls’.
S.4 L.3 – Should ‘is’ be deleted?

S.5 L.1 – crawl >> will crawl.  Future tense works better coming off S.4, in my opinion.

Good reading, thanks for posting.

T
 

[indar]

https://arizonadailyindependent.com/201 ... -survivor/

Actually this is an old one that stirred up from the bottom as a result of one of your poems/ another on a different site re/the desert and the idea you raised in "second time" that deals with cyclical eras of life (I think). 

I need to get dinner on but will return to look at your other suggestions.

Thanks Tracy

[Amie]

You have some great lines and images here, and again, I really like the ending.

A couple of thoughts:
You made me wonder why Joshua Trees are so ubiquitous in poems. I've never seen one in real life, I had to do google images. I wonder how many people who don't live near a desert know what a Joshua Tree looks like? And do they appear in poems for the Jesus allusion, or because they look like something that could survive a holocaust?

I like "hard-bitten desert rats", but couldn't see how wiry creosote tied in to the rest of the images, or Route 66

I did wonder if that land will be ocean floor again before the oceans boil away, but that's probably me being too literal

[indar]

Hi Amie,

I sort of lost track of a read but unanswered response here (bad habit). Joshua Tree in this case refers to the largest National Park in the US. The easternmost end of it is below sea level (known as low desert for now). As polar caps melt parts of California will be submerged. There are computer projections that show water "pathways to areas of low desert that will fill with ocean before some coastal areas are overtaken. I suppose the sun will burn it off into cloud cover some day and another ice-age will result (strictly my speculation). What life form after that? My money is on the cockroaches. 

https://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/26/o ... you-think/

As for the creosote---its an amazing bush--see the link I posted in my answer to Tracy in the above response. Some of those bushes are 1,100 years old according to carbon dating