Terra Incognita

Before the cities came, the bitter winds blew hot dirt as ash. The earthen clay knew not measure nor consistency, only feast and famine. Monsoon rains would envelope the land with spasmodic shudders. In fusillade fury, broadside storms violated the topsoil. Swirls and churns of frothed, brown cake, wet with retribution, rankled the formerly dry landscape. Standing rain from the sky filled the gulleys and ditches to excess. Ice pelted the earth on and off while violent lateral heaves enveloped the dry beds and leapt onto the brittled, needy yellow chutes of grass. Spring’s tempestuous fury.

In the ennui of August, waves of dust roil in remorse. Stilted yellow spears bend in servitude to the wind. The sun beats mercilessly on the backs of all living things. Undulate ripples of heat produce an acrid, bitter swell across the dry rolling hills and valleys. Trees drip embers, shed weeping their crowned glory. Fields yield barrenness. In mornings, red rock ignites with sunrise and at evening the dying day melts into burnt orange eaves of dusk, fading deep red into dark night.

When winters nocturnal bliss bears down upon short days, the wind and water, in desperate solace, breed a beautiful contempt, blanket the terrain in duplicitous hostility. Naked trees cower desolate. The eye glides across acres of deception, refracting off the brilliant sheen of frigid glass which belies the truth.

And always, always, always the wind, pronouncing in shrieks and howls uncontested might, advancing and surmounting, in vacillate, unforgiving billows. The wind, reoccurs to raze and ruin, silent and concealed elsewhere, here a monarch embodied in mercurial throes.

This tumbling terrain bears the brunt of a perennial ardor, lavish, capricious whoring with the elements: courting spring, spurning summer, philandering with fall, depriving winter. Each love bereft of commitment; desirous of fidelity. Following every passion, the land always returns to days of malaise; the night, deep dank of nothing upon nothingness, a bitter parch, testament to the wind’s scorn.

Florid inconstant, your flowering awaits.

Those whose depth of despair eclipses your height of desire appears as salvation upon the breath of Kilihote.