Charlene Langfur

Under a Starry, Starry Night Charlene Langfur

The mountains are covered with stars tonight like the world at the start of what I know is around me. I listen to the sway of the palm trees, the sounds of the familiar, company in the night for a woman alone under the thick desert sky, under mountains covered in snow, and I am trying to put a life together again with 100s of small plans and a big idea or two about saving the world and living deeply doing it if only for a moment or a year or a lifetime. And now here especially when the place is as quiet as it gets and the black crows and the mountain bluebirds lie low and the smallest lizards hide under the biggest rocks and I can feel the sky and the weather on my face as if it is palpable, and I am aware of all of it as it is tonight, earth, the glow of the scrub grass in the shallow lights, the wild flowers out in the sand, crazy blue, all of them coming back for more and more no matter what tries to stop them, the way life is here, the way it comes back and back, flowering like mad, true to exactly how they are

Charlene Langfur lives in Palm Springs, California, and is a southern Californian, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow. Her most recent publications include poems in Emrys, Inlandia, North Dakota Quarterly, and a series of poems forthcoming in Weber – The Contemporary West.