In memory of
Everett Ruess (1914-1934)

Fanning his daggers desert-wise like a land-locked sea urchin, flaunting his tall flowered stalk as a scepter frantic with ants, Yucca has waited years for this tumultuous April blossoming. The high noon of his spiny life, fragrant with dates and mad panicle of sticky white flowers, is popcorned on the intense blue field beyond Joat 1, the Tongva people’s snowy peak. Yucca shouts in April to Joat – one strident life-filled blossoming jubilant floral swan-song westward – and immediately Yucca dies. One fervent burst of pithy oratory to announce dying, as this, my chant. Yucca too is a weather-beaten exile wandering harsh deserts, thriving on drought and frenetic adversities, as this, my soul. Self-fructifying ultra-plant, he stands erect in hot and cold winds of Yavi 2 wind-that-dries-things-up, archaic exhale, inhale, of the world’s rhythmic breathing. Candle of Happiness, he radiates the flames of Mukat’s 3 funeral pyre and that non-human force: affirmation.

Yucca’s lone shadow exults with me under the shooting star cutting night’s canvas coldly with a white-hot sword stroke. This nocturnal tremor of terror moves within these lightly poisoned spines, lit in April, as was this, my spirit. This ironic blossoming in the graveyard of yucca ancestors now dead and fallen (or some with brittle stalks still standing that Yavi’s fierce Cajon Pass blasts for the life of him couldn’t knock down), evokes Odysseus in the House of Hades before pouting Ajax and ghostly horde. Living and dead yuccas meet as those warriors, though Ajax’s spite made him darkly hush while the wind noisily shakes dried phalloi rattling dry date pods like desolate bells or a dead poet’s posthumous verses. The ghostly horde receds into death’s realm while the living shuffles into life briefly, transfigured Birnam Woods. Yucca! Your blossoms wilt and humbly fall to fulfill your remaining destiny: decay. Once moist, Sun struck Yucca’s pulp bone dry. His hold on the continent finally loosens and Yavi ruthlessly knocks him down into years of dusty biography

to slowly rot beyond the seasons of teeming insect infestations, made dust, as will be this, my body. We die twice: flesh and spirit disappear and then second death – we are forgotten. Brief rites with flowers and words and then the dead are finally left alone not tempted to return from shadowy play beyond fading names on tombstones. For poets the second death is delayed called back from death by fame’s illusion and anguished mortals lost on earth who warm themselves briefly at our fire – until all whom we know, love, hate shall dissolve and ever shall forgotten be. Yucca’s dead stalk lay across the boy’s path when I hopped over it like the day of my death ”an ’twere a man born in April.”4