OUT OF THE FOREST

A man steps out of the forest, a close family
of oaks in the shade of one another. Nothing
is as it was. Dry channels of rivers crumble

in a desert where green, ripe heads once bent
heavy with the breeze, in a lifetime’s flash
of time past and time to come—one moment

without beginning or end—a continual wash
of colors nevermore the same. The dull sacrilege
of leather-skinned mountain men felling the first

bountiful oak before native eyes bled into brown
forts that became settlements, before the gray
railroad towns and blond dry-land farming,

before the irrigated ground was planted to houses
surrounding bright cities run on more of the same.
And she gave-in and continued giving as she has

and will again, for time is nothing, just the passing
of a brush stroke on an endless panorama of ever-
changing colors that we are washed within.