Joshua Tree Imprimatur

"The great Creator told us, 'I'm going to teach you these songs, but before I teach you these songs, I'm going to break your heart.'" - Larry Eddy (Chemehuevi)

after the Navajo Night Chant, as told by N. Scott Momaday

In Joshua Tree

In the land that crowns its needled glories with sand

In the desert made of pavement fallen from the Milky Way

In the desert made of deep holes, carved by grinding stones

In the desert made of gashed canyons, cut straight through stone

In the desert made of walking rain that the eye can far-off see

In the desert made of fan tree palms

In the desert made of cold

In the desert made of blinding mirage

In the desert made of light so old it whispers like grooved bones

Where the woolly mammoth and rattlesnake cross time and home,

Oceans of time rising and receding, land quaking in their paths

Where the granite batholiths arch their backs

Where the red-tailed hawks vault their hunting songs

Oh, desert night lizard!

With your comet tail, sparking eternities of stars

With your rustling inside the fallen Washington fan palms

With your invisible sipping at faint oases

With your instinct for scuttling sideways up sharp rock hills

With your narrow paths in the native grasses

With your nest inside fallen Joshua Trees,

With your burrowed body penetrating sand dunes

With your zigzag shape, you whip your way into abandoned mines

In Joshua Tree

In the land that prophets barren land with shouldered

Trees that are not trees, but lilies, they call you by many names

In the desert, where flash floods chorus and howl in summer’s long crawl

In the desert, where footsteps penetrate the night

In the desert, where bobcats and mountain lions prowl

In the desert, where the bighorn sheep scuttles at sunset in the highest rocks

In the desert, where shade rests in deep and narrow space

In the desert, where the early Pinto people carved their words into eternity

In the desert, where Chemehuevi Indians called Oasis of Mara home

In the desert, where small cemeteries mark the empty land

Oh, desert homestead!

With your early people, hunting big game

With your ancient glaciers, carving the land to bone

With your old men and women, anxious for gold

With your young lovers, Willie Boy and Carlota, who could not share

Their love in silence with the land

With your reliance on the creosote for medicine and tea

With your vast wisdom of how every spare desert plant could be food

With your cemented reservoir at Barker Dam, a sweet man-made pool

With your earth-gouged wounds, gutted for their jewels

With your global tourists and rock climbers, hikers, plein air artists,

Musicians, ravers, thrilled children, all feeling they have found a home

In Joshua Tree

In the land where rattlesnake meets highway

With your ancient Indian trails snaking their way from Colorado River

To the coast, the California Hiking Trail and Highway 62 follow

Your wise old routes

With your hidden built-in palm oases, shouldering timeless stands

Of Washington Palms that survived the time of the dinosaur

With your visiting painters and photographers and Hollywood directors,

Walt Disney painted colors on pictographs he could show

With your nearby cities, fighting to eat your rare resources,

With golf courses blowing their invasive species of mustard grass

With Marine base blowing up the ancient, sacred sister mountains

With high desert towns competing for your northern love

With your sloped drop on your southern edge into the land we call low

In the desert raging with fires that burn invisible things we cannot see

Until they are dissolved

In the desert where people wander off and get lost

In the desert where coyotes and jackrabbits and kangaroo rats and tarantulas shoulder the slow, desert tortoise crawl

In the desert, where Minerva Hoyt came to your rescue and made you a National Park

In the desert, where Eagle Mountain dump nibbles at your eastern fringe

In the desert, where orange and ruby sherbet sunsets are your dessert

In the desert, where your shallow rooted namesake trees

Gnarl their arms skyward in a massive prayer

In the desert, where wind shreds your needled skin into pulp

In the desert, where snowstorms powder the barren ground

In Joshua Tree

Where canyons spill into nowhere lands

Where dayglo bright colors paint the sand in spring’s melodic verse

Where the June sun tarnishes the artist’s canvas brown

Where garbage blows indiscriminate of color, age or race

Where boulders become pillows for society’s aching back

Where lovers fight and surrender into the long sweep of Key’s View

Where the Wall Street Mill offers empty promises of old

Where the families camp and come to explore

In the desert, where the crush of nearby Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange Counties falls away

In the desert, where motorcycles can’t whine, forbidden here

In the desert, where Ryan Mountain superimposes its stoic landhold

In the desert, where the Little San Bernardino Mountains rise to pinyon pine

In the desert, where transition zones abound

In the desert, where rain may not visit for a year

In the desert, where water may destroy

In the desert, your name is scratched into stars

In the desert, you survive, you survive

In Joshua Tree.

Oh Joshua Trees, populating this arid ocean,

In the land where prophets turn for words

When colors bloom and fade

When lovers come and do not stay

When the last footprints have quickly blown away

When the first impressions of human hands have been found

You find your true name

Where the sands filter through your hands

In the desert, you are lost, and you are found.

c. 2008 by Ruth Nolan