Desert Sestina

When I set off into the wilderness, I had plenty
of cookies for three days of hiking through orange
globemallow and prickly pear cactus, but a problem
arose on the very first day that caused me to stumble
and tumble backwards and down into a rocky draw
where I lost my cookies at the height of the season.

In a land of illusive rain, spring is the best season
and reason to explore the desert with its plentitude
of neon clean blossoms and secretive creatures drawn
from shadowy habits into the bright light orange
days for food and water, for the pure joy of stumbling
over each other for love, for forgetting problems.

But spring in the desert can’t last and the problem
is that foreign matter can from season to season
with dry winds and no rain. Creatures must stumble
upon my broken cookies and digest them or plenty
of chunks and crumbs will petrify in the torrid orange
scorch of summer down on the floor of that draw.

And future archaeologists would undoubtedly draw
conclusions about the odd debris, worry a problem
not knowing it was me who had fallen with an orange
backpack over the edge of reason, down that season
onto granite scree that broke my ankle while plenty
of bruises blossomed bright to prove who stumbled

on her first day in the desert. I felt like a stumble-
bum rookie, a tenderfoot, a dark-eyed fledgling drawn
from the nest before knowing how to fly. Oh, plenty
were the personal epithets I assigned, the problem
easily forgotten of crumbs scattered like seasoning
across the sand, raisin brown almond burnt orange.

When I set off into the wilderness in those orange
and black butterfly days as an artless spring stumbler
of rock, when for a very good reason in the season
of midlife I fell down, down in a rabbit hole draw,
I tasted the sharp crumbs of mortality and problems
small withered and flew but still I cursed a-plenty!

I had thought twenty was plenty but that was a problem
and very good reason in all desert seasons to stumble
and tumble down orange-varnished cliffs in a draw.