Death of the Lavender Fields

Hill Country, Texas, in the summer drought:
Blue-purple pill-like petals dried or greyed
except in rare, spare areas of shade
where others seeking shade are driven out
by lashes of mesquite, arboreal knout.
Beneath the sun’s unsparing chereb-blade
rich colors, lavender corollas, fade
and hillocks bulge and redden as with gout.
Provence, who with its lavish plumes would flout,
repents the perfumed excess of its clade
and wishes prayers for sun had gone unprayed
and burns ecstatic in a dearth of doubt.

Even if rain could come—and well it may—
the fields have crusted with a lacquered shell
to keep the most torrential rain at bay.
And hot and choking folds of dust-wind swell,
bend, coil, and shimmer dully like a snake
where dormant desert impulses awake.



2015