Here's some poetry.  Mostly I wrote these a long time ago in the heat(s) of passion--but not the haiku.  It's pretty hard to be passionate when you're counting syllables, right? 

First

This is about the peaks just north of Flagstaff, Arizona.  They're sacred to the Hopis because that's where the dangerous Kachinas spend their time.  The peaks are part of one huge, enormous, vast and ancient volcano.  On the north face of the tallest mountain is a hot spot left over from their glory days; the snow melts off as soon as it falls.  Many natives of Flagstaff avoid trips to California because they're afraid of earthquakes.  Me, I'd move off that scary mountain. 

San Francisco Peaks

Hopi kivas wait
the promised second coming;
Magma Kachina

Second
Here's something I wrote in college about a girlhood home near Ojai, California.  It was a good place to be eight years old.   Maybe I should mention that southern California hills in summer are grassy and gold. 


Learning to See

Hills like folds of flesh, leonine.
Lines of black, lean trees
climb, and sometimes line their folds where
I learned horses,
and heat,
and where my eyes learned visions.
Home.  Mirage.  Image-shimmer.

Third
Okay, here's the heat of passion.  Grand Falls is where the Little Colorado River falls from the Navajo Reservation three hundred feet and makes a 90-degree turn to the right.   Its waters are the rust-red of the neighboring Painted Desert.  During spring runoff Grand Falls can spew more water than Niagara Falls.  In summer it's a child of the monsoon, alternately placid and evil.  Lightning stabs anything more than six feet tall.

Grand Falls

Grand Falls the snowmelt and stones and old tree stumps
into a canyon
like a half-cocked pistol 
and bangs a green meadow too simple for heaven.

Red-checkered tablecloth, green German wine and
faces spray-speckled,
spray
like a woman's hair, curling in clouds of
wet dreams of romance.

A cave curves in, dreaming, under the falls; it's
shallow and private
like the nape of a neck and not easy to reach
unless you know the territory.
But then, neither is the meadow;
first, you have to go down.

A pavilion sits over the falls,
wood, slatted.
The mist and noise mount its rooftop at sunset
and prickle like hairs on your skin.

Storms begin circling, but more in high summer,
slowly and sphinctering.
Lightning-stakes fence in the world
and the thunder herds couples, shoulder to shoulder,
into its shelter.

Light comes in flashes that tint love's face greenish
and leave a red blotch 
or maybe it's terror 
the greenness and red afterimage

and the wind you can hear snaking in through the uprights,
sloping the roof 'til it slips into Grand Falls,
the sink in the bowels, the coppery taste
may mean
you're only afraid of the storm.