Laurie Lessen Reiche
Oasis
a Thanksgiving Poem
Flawless California November. No,
it isn’t a cartoon though the birds twittering make it sound
like one and the swimming pool-blue sky and bongo-playing
woodpecker and the trees with their thousands of broccoli-green
leaf-hands all doing the princess-wave and the ice-white horse
down in the valley, his inky lips opening and through picket fence-big teeth
crying, “Wooooheeeeeeee!” three times in a row (he’s lonely on this happy
morning, poor mouthy guy waiting for his slender rider
to get home from school) and, of course, the sun, perfect silver circle
ringed in daffodil-yellow, is a benevolent grinning king come out of his hot
castle wearing a searing electric crown of diamonds that rain little gem-chips
down on the grass and tree leaves of California November
and everything is glittering while Bambi and his hardy mother and his father and his sisters and his brothers have a picnic feasting on juicy violets and
nasturtiums that sprang up this autumn, and for dessert they are eating
the diamond-glazed grass blades and the deer become illuminated, shining
as is everything, even the ravens, those faithful black angels veering over the oasis
of this luminescent day, their darkness shining slick as an old road to nowhere,
but their black radiation lights up the lane to the horizon and there I see the tip of December’s head being born and the first sound its new ears hear
is a chorus of gratitude rising from the rooftops of every house in America
and December is relieved to find itself in a world so hospitable, so
incandescent and ready for the greater light that’s coming as it always does
in winter and the flawless California skies will hardly change
and if they do it will be to let spill even more profusely
the valuables raining from the smiling mouth
of the king.
