The tragedy in the irony
of No Child Left Behind
was never the inadequacy of the policy
but rather,
the assumption that it’s possible to have
no losers
in a finite game.

* * *
Each year, less than two and a half inches
of rainwater nourish Death Valley—
the hottest and driest place in North America.

* * *
We play this game all the way through.
“And what do you want to do with that [major]?”
they almost always ask,
with an unpretentious curiosity
that never quite pangs me the way I think it should.
Reassured by the familiarity of the ritual,
of asking and answering
this question
for most of my educated life.

* * *
The Valley,
marked by steady drought,
boasting record heat for days on end,
and devoid of visible life,
is remarkable in it’s
uniform emptiness.

* * *
“How are your grades?”
“What are your extracurriculars?”
“Why do you want to go to a liberal arts college?”
They ask, and I answer.
Across the hall they might ask
“Wouldn’t it make your family proud if you went to college?”
(Like expectations,
some rungs must sit lower
on finite ladders)
But the question is always the same—
it’s always a question of ends.

* * *
In the Winter of 2005
three times the normal amount of rain
wet the dry floor of Death Valley,
seeping into the scorched, thirsty cracks,
parched from praying all summer.

* * *
These ends surface
again and again
in our language.
Yet to escape the international contest
since A Nation at Risk,
investments and ends at every level
are (naturally) presumed economic.

* * *
That Spring saw the coaxing of waxy seeds,
after decades of unbroken slumber,
realized into a singular, infinite bloom.
The sleepy desert lupine
and hearty, golden poppies
felt sunlight
for the first time in 50 years.

* * *
The second tragedy,
greater than the first,
is the alienation of millions of
young beings.
The slow death
wrought by living a bounded life
of the caterpillar
never set to feel the sky.
The passions we mask and confuse
and cement ever more deeply,
hardened, at every step
by the conformity in our
expectations.
The means to which we grasp at
these apparent ends.

* * *
A sudden rush of caterpillars
fed by blue, purple and yellow blossoms
grew until they saw from above,
the spontaneous gathering
of birds, rodents, foxes, and snakes,
renewed again to life
by the tender hands of rain.

* * *
In a world where we stop asking
engineers
to build plants,
I imagine the organic
explosion
of latent seeds
everywhere.