When the Water Comes

It is odd, the morning after watching

what might be called a storm go by, missing us,

seemingly tugged off-line by the thirsty Catalina Range,

scarcely ten miles east of us,

to see water cross the road,

slipping necessarily to those rambling,

sandy ravines called "rivers" on the map.

It is fugitive water,

having escaped an endless network

of almost invisible, shallow roots

lying in wait for what seldom comes,

surplus water, left over

after the sand has sucked what it can,

river-bed-bound water

migrating like newborn butterflies

that turn north to where they have never been,

and like the butterflies,

almost surely destined not to make it all the way,

leaving that for the next storm.

In a desert,

even too much water

is not enough water.

Plants are waxy-shiny,

reluctant to let water evaporate,

knowing that water-let-go

must circle the earth again

before the next rain.

In the meantime,

a few of the roots

stretch down where caliche allows it,

following the fading water down,

and down, determined to go

deeper still the next time water comes.

The plants believe in water,

however little evidence there is of it,

except on those mornings

after a storms slips by, higher up,

and the hard, greedy ground,

thwarted by its own hardness,

watches the water run across the road

to make the river a river.

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