A sage poem

By Zach Hively

​For the rain keeping things cool.

If there’s one thing that defines being New Mexican in the United States, it might well be this: We know we are special, while at the same time we feel indescribably inferior to other places. Maybe it’s because we’re not widely known as superlatively anything, or big-league in any way but the nuclear ones.

(It’s fitting that our most major sports team is a joke from The Simpsons. We’re a Triple-A state in a lot of ways to a lot of people. [I don’t think so, but they do.])
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I remember being a kid and talking with this other kid, from Phoenix, about how hot it gets. He bragged that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in Phoenix. I hated that Phoenix was hotter than Albuquerque, where I lived. We only occasionally kissed 100°F, usually sitting squarely in the nineties, maybe even the eighties. I don’t really remember, except that A HUNDRED was a really impressive threshold that meant, somehow, we had made the big time. It wasn’t 120° or anything, but it was the upper echelon of hotness, and we might taste it for a brief moment in July before the monsoons rolled in.

This is the sixth June that I’ve been back in New Mexico. With ten days to go—fingers crossed—it will be the first one not to hit a hundred at my house. Every other one has, and not just sporadically, but long enough, consistently enough, for a newsworthy Isotopes winning streak.
Climate patterns take place on a long-term scale. One good June doesn’t give me much hope. But I still welcome it—along with its welcome rains.

For this season of reprieve—long live temps in the eighties!—I offer a sage poem.

My sage plants
poke hard from the sand
each year, inching
new green. They ditch
last year’s scrabbled
gains, start again
from scratch.
 
Yeah, sure, it’s hard
out there. Winds chip
away the paint, grind
this world’s teeth
to nubs. I for one
could not survive
out there, alone,
 
on the wrong
side of the door.
I dole out water
from the tanks, never
quite so lavish
as the day before
a forecasted storm.
 
It rains, I pour.
A full barrel
buttresses against
—the worst.
Worse than
no water
in the sand?
 
So--
my sage plants poke
hard from the ground
each year, inching new
green, ditching last
year’s scrabble, starting
themselves from scratch.