Desert Oracle

Vigil of the Yucca
 
Out where the dust forgets the day's bright name, where mesas hold their breath against the sky, the desert sheds its skin of sun and flame and lifts a paler face to mysteries.
The moon ascends, a wafer, white and slow, a host elevated above the sage, and from the dark arroyos far below the coyotes begin their gospel age.
They sing in tongues no scripture ever held, old liturgies of bone and bristled fur, the canticles their grandmothers compelled out of the silver throat of lavender.
And there, she opens. Yucca, candelabra, white-flowered priestess of the patient years, each petal a small bell of cold abracadabra rung once for every prayer the spine reveres.
She blooms only for those who travel night, the small grey moth who knows her by her breath, who climbs into her chamber, soft, polite, and trades the only currency: small death,
small pollen-death, small marriage at the altar of stamens pale as bone, of sepals wide as Marian sleeves. The moth does not falter. The yucca closes her around like a bride.
Outside, the cereus and datura wake, the trumpet-throated, moon-drunk congregation, each chalice opened for the night to take its sacrament of perfume and gestation.
The coyotes pause. Even they know reverence. The wind goes quiet as a censer swung. And from her green sword-leaves the yucca's presence speaks in a tongue that has no human tongue,
only the slow white burning of her flowers, only the moth, the moon, the holy hour, the secret that the desert kept for ours: that night is not an absence. Night is power.