All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.

Root Surrounded by Ithuriel's Spears

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MY NEW LIFE

My new life began on a rural avenue
that twenty years before was miles
from the edge of town, the pastureland,
vineyards and orchards slowly erased

by houses and businesses. Near
the freeway, close to the river
on the south side, secure subdivisions
now crowd together along

the bluff. For years, I had taken
the rural avenues north of the river
to witness the seasons, never aware
that the city was sprawling so far north

as I gazed at orchards in bloom
or bearing fruit or bare, in spring mustard
and purple vetch choking the roadside and the rows
of some orchards. No longer grazed, pastures blossomed

with fiddleneck and owl's clover, one, almost wild,
with harvest brodiaea, the umbels crowning blonde grass
with purple, the leaves of vineyards with brilliant auras
in slanted sunlight. On the first afternoon

of my new life, I drove the avenue homeward
and saw on Avenue 40 the first bulldozers lined up
in a place where I had sighted a yellow-headed blackbird,
not far from a post where once a roadrunner perched,

the only one I have sighted on the valley floor. Ahead
stretched acres of grasslands and the plateaus,
the base of the foothills. The county had rezoned
the land so that in twenty years a city

could grow there as far as the eye could see,
from the river all the way into the foothills.
Then, I would be living my new life
without wild flowers on land where 

song birds cannot forage, a land without roots,
a river with roots of rain but with water
that can never find an ocean.