Robin Scofield
Robin Scofield is the author of Flow, winner of the Southwest Book Award in 2019. Her poems currently appear in Cutthroat, The San Pedro River Review, and The Ocotillo Review. Her poems have previously appeared in The Paris Review, Theology Today, and The Texas Observer. She writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, Texas, where she lives with her husband and her Belgian Shepherd dog.
Desert Marigold in Your Short Season
How you flower and seed so muchwhile the miserly creosote bush withholds.
You populate the path over the damand persist among white rocks
though people pick your yellow bloomsthat wilt and won’t revive in a vase.
How you branch gray-green in a hurry.How you hunker down in the arroyo.
How these white stones are like seeds,birthing more stones, our whole world
is a small rock, and a rock the sizeof a kitchen table bashed the Urals yesterday
while another one three-hundred yards longpassed as close as possible without striking us.
Statistically, Desert Marigold, neither you nor I are here at all.
We are that improbable.
You populate the path over the damand persist among white rocks
though people pick your yellow bloomsthat wilt and won’t revive in a vase.
How you branch gray-green in a hurry.How you hunker down in the arroyo.
How these white stones are like seeds,birthing more stones, our whole world
is a small rock, and a rock the sizeof a kitchen table bashed the Urals yesterday
while another one three-hundred yards longpassed as close as possible without striking us.
Statistically, Desert Marigold, neither you nor I are here at all.
We are that improbable.
Bodies in Motion
Voyager has passed the Kuiper belt, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Berry’s Johnny B. Goode ready to play with a diamond needle on a gold-plated copper record as well as greetings in 55 human languages. There’s a sketch of a naked woman and man, and a starmap to where we are in our spiraling galaxy. At the health spa the disingenuous go for it in special clothes, not getting anywhere even though they’re not out in the weather. Yoga pants disturb certain onlookers. Hot yoga, is that really a good idea?
The big red storm on Jupiter is a depression, a hurricane, stable chaos. There’s no pill for it. Io, with underground oceans, revolves in its own turbulence, and we don’t usually think about it.
We think about Alpha Centauri and what robot hands could do. We look for planets in the Goldilocks Zone. We can’t live in airless space or on the burning of a star, a relative position akin to none.
Hollywood starlets love the proletariat but too late. The poor will always be with us, said a sad Jew who hated money.
Tarantulas that love us hide in our shoes. But they are not poisonous. We are.
The big red storm on Jupiter is a depression, a hurricane, stable chaos. There’s no pill for it. Io, with underground oceans, revolves in its own turbulence, and we don’t usually think about it.
We think about Alpha Centauri and what robot hands could do. We look for planets in the Goldilocks Zone. We can’t live in airless space or on the burning of a star, a relative position akin to none.
Hollywood starlets love the proletariat but too late. The poor will always be with us, said a sad Jew who hated money.
Tarantulas that love us hide in our shoes. But they are not poisonous. We are.
Along the Path
A charm of finches flies toward a fetch of blue-black dragonflies, winged ink pens among the willows
feasting on generations of mosquitos in the millions that hang over the river water
like a lace veil yellowed with age. Each stone shines like a seed in morning sun.
Mountains grow and tumble down to give birth after eons of thunderstorms and flash floods that gash out canyons.
I think of the difficult path to Cottonwood Springs, washed out and treacherous with new-broken stones,
how I am planting myself with each footstep
among purple verbena, springing up from from white rocks which live a bit longer and erode more slowly
than the seeds that float away
carried by stream and wind, light as my trembling hand
when I try to gather them and I cannot.
feasting on generations of mosquitos in the millions that hang over the river water
like a lace veil yellowed with age. Each stone shines like a seed in morning sun.
Mountains grow and tumble down to give birth after eons of thunderstorms and flash floods that gash out canyons.
I think of the difficult path to Cottonwood Springs, washed out and treacherous with new-broken stones,
how I am planting myself with each footstep
among purple verbena, springing up from from white rocks which live a bit longer and erode more slowly
than the seeds that float away
carried by stream and wind, light as my trembling hand
when I try to gather them and I cannot.
