In the Big Fat Roselight of Oranges and Lemons ...

As the roselight of the city speaks through me, it’s piped out musak pure and clear as a dot streaming down from satellite radio, digital clarity, I must say: Excellent sound system here. And the light. The light. Maybe it’s just the openness of this area of Phoenix, the Arcadia district with orange trees still plentiful, filling in the spaces of these 50-year-old residential areas is the cool spring morning blazes into view. I know it so well. Phoenix. This place I keep coming back to. Maybe it’s because of the weather?
As I gather my thoughts, written on some canyon map during a coffee, bidi and piece
of some kind of prettily made bread break;
while gazing at a Hummer-covered parking lot
at a gentrified suburban Republican Bistro called “Le Grande Orange,” the words flew:

I charted this course
with a red string
on a map of black chalk
The roads are many,
the final choice, new

I climb up the cafe canyon
walls to get a better view,
to see over the trees
and see my way to you

Having returned like Prometheus
to my city in pretty chains of light,
the rains have stopped like Porches
braking in the sun, which burns,
big and bright, drying this coffee stop
tabletop with its eviscerating truth

Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr

Is this city immune to war?

This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop

Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing

And while the danceworld cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art

Now that I’m stuck in this city now for the forseable future, as the sun continues to climb up and over the vines, the light filtering through, the latin music pattering, this coffeehouse daydream of mine is an obsession now. This wireless world of windless days, creature comforts, coffee, the scent setting the mind ready to ignite a cig. That’s the spring in Arizona, and there’s nothing better.
This week, people died on two separate days of tornados in the Midwest. Yes, springtime is the tornado season. This year, condition red. Strange how all color charts for fear bleed into one. Even stranger how a single sunrise can cause all doubters to believe in spring. And as the world spins faster, ever faster, it’s good to know, when you find it, what home feels like.
At least for now. The summer of war this 2006 looks to be a fairly dicey proposition from wherever you stand.