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With Chortling Chuckwallas  A lone human figure stands in the salt flats of Badwater in Death Valley, CA |
By PAUL HERTELENDY
of TheColumnists.com
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Trundle past the
endless salt flats of Badwater Where the borax boxcars hauled by twenty mules Once snaked uphill Laboriously combating fearsome desert heat Below the level of the sea. You enter badlands torn up By the some-time flashing floods That neatly scour the box-shaped gullies Where there’s no escape. You clamber up the parched arroyo Where the blood-red mountains tower overhead. You mop the rivulets of sweat with your bandana, Reaping zero sympathy from fat chuckwalla lizards Watching from the shade And chortling in their pithy Schadenfreude. An early nameless pioneer had perished In traversal with his horse-drawn wagon Through the biscuit-oven summer. Now Death Valley is his lasting epitaph and legacy. Sundown. Once the dayfire calms, Relief from heat fulfills through cooling night, Beyond oasis patch of valley date palms Where you swim in blackest dark And view the stars in diamond brilliance: Great Orion’s belt, Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Vega and the Dog Star--- You can’t be Sirius, surely?--- And more you never knew were even there. These times, the valley comes alive And spreads its aura far and near and here, Inhaling all the galaxies it must In massive breaths that clear The remnant noonday dust. |
---Death Valley days and nights (CA)
Ed. Note: Schadenfreude (say “shuttin’ Freud day”)
in German is delight over another’s misfortune.
©2012 by Paul Hertelendy. This column first posted Jan. 23, 2012.
Paul Hertelendy is critic and webmaster for the arts-review web site www.artssf.com, and is also the Piedmont (CA) Centennial poet laureate. To visit his website, click here: PAUL
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