Near the Desert Test Sites (Palm Desert, California)

—for Logan and Renée Jenkins Unlike almost everything Else just surviving here In summer, poison flowers Flourish in this sweltering Heat, tangling like blown Litter in fences around The trailer parks and motel Pools, and turning the islands Pinkish-white between Divided lanes of freeway, Where all day long against The burnished hubbub of U- Haul trucks and automobiles, Off-the-road vehicles and Campers, the oleander shakes Its brightly polished pocket- Knives, as at the motorcade Of some ambassador hurrying Through a village of the poor. And every day by late after- Noon the overwatered lawns Around the shopping mall Still burn off brown, their Pampered opulence upbraided By the palms’ insomniac Vision of one ineffable apoc- Alyptic noon. But the smell Is somehow sweeter than That makes you think, a dry Lemon-sweetness, as if some- Where nearby wild verbena Has been forced to leaf By a match held up to each Bud—and the silo-skyscraper Holiday Inn at the famous Resort “Where the Horizon Ends” could almost be that Match the way the heat Sloughs off it like after- Burn. And yet, because Of the way the sun in- Tensifies everything, one Always has the feeling there Is much less here than meets The eye: the halcyon blink Of a shard of glass, a Lear- Jet wafted into vapor out On the tarmac’s run, the way Common quartzstone gives Off heat which seems to come From inside itself, and not, In fact, from that more- Than-imaginably-nuclear sun Which every morning starts Up so illusionless, and every Evening slow-dissolves On the blue and otherwise Planetary hills, like a Valium Breaking up on the tongue.