Something in the Air

By Dick Altman

Northern New Mexico
Fall, can’t you wait?
Spring didn’t arrive
until mid-summer.
Not a drop in eight months
drank high desert’s plain.
I thirsted for blooms
yellow, blue and purple.
Shades that bring to life
life’s spare tapestry
I share here
at seven-thousand feet.
I hollowed Chamisa’s
leafless bodies,
to breathe green
into brittle arms
of gray.
Watched in dismay
how skeletal grew
Aspen’s crowns.
I cut to ground
fifty-year-old pinion,
a small forest, 
drought-loving
bark beetles ravaged
without mercy.
What should have been
months of high desert’s
lean fertile glory
turned into weeks.
Fall, your cool nights
soon will beget 
the first frost.
Bees scavenge
the last amethyst
of Russian sage. 
I feel death in the air.
Could you not
for once wait?

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, Tatterhood Review, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, Sky Island Journal and others here and abroad.  He is a poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition.  He has in progress two collections of published poetry, Voices in the Heart of Stones and Telling the Broken Sky.