Never mistake clarity for simplicity. The clearest pane of glass offers the best view on the true complexity of the world beyond. Many writers busy up the page in an effort to appear complex but they achieve only opacity and self-referential murk. It is the study of a lifetime to learn artistic clarity and one must begin again each day in the knowledge that you can never achieve it perfectly—though as Jack Gilbert wrote , "What else gets it right as much as poetry?" 

Money doesn't grow on trees. Neither does garlic, but let's pretend it does.

It's slated to near 100 degrees on the Front Range today, the kind of high July heat that signals the tops of the white onions and shallots to fall and the garlic scapes to shade green-to-brown, all indicators that harvest time has come.

This morning I saw some friends off to the airport very early, which left me caffienated and raring to go at 6:30 a.m. The morning was soft and cool, in the mid-60s, and the sun was liquid gold on the broad leaves of the Lazarus Vine—my name for the table grape vine that would not die (a long story best told elsewhere).

I pulled most of the allium varieties out of the soil. I'd stopped watering them a couple of weeks back to get them to mature and cure a bit. They responded nicely to this insult and by this morning, the onions bulbs were bulging up like the spawn of Moby Dick breaching a soily sea. I pulled about 30 of them out and lay them, stalks over bulbs, in a narrow row. They'll finish curing there for a couple of days and then I'll store them just a little while, until the time is right.

And it is all about timing. The onions have to wait until the chili peppers and tomatoes ripen. The good news is that it won't be long.

And what does it all mean? It means a bowl of fresh pico de gallo (beak of the rooster), one of the great treats of summer. The process goes like this:

1. Molcajete—if you don't own one of these lava-stone, mortar-and-pestle bowls, buy one.
2. Garlic—cut the top quarter-inch off an unpeeled whole head of garlic so the cloves are just exposed; place it cut side down in a hot cast iron skillet and roast it until the cloves are soft, maybe 5 minutes. Squeeze the garlic into the molcajete and grind it to a paste. Don't worry if the garlic sticks to the sides, as it is seasoning the molcajete and will be absorbed into the salsa later.
3. Chilis—roast and/or chop a couple hot chilis and grind them into the paste.
4. Tomatoes—roasted or fresh, grind a de-seeded tomato into the paste, which will now look more like a sauce.
5. Onions, Tomatoes, Chilis—rough chop these to taste and add them but don't grind them down. The amounts are open to your taste and preference.
6. Cilantro—add to taste.
7. Salt & Pepper—add to taste.
8. Lime—a little squeeze will do.
9. Tortilla Chips—cut a short stack of corn tortillas in eighths and quick fry them in safflower oil; let them drain on a paper towel, then salt both sides lightly. Or, be a lazy ass and buy some bland ones at the store, but understand you are marring what could be a transcendent gustatory experience.
10. Serve the pico de gallo with a side of fresh guacamole and a pitcher of margaritas.

Then, be happy. Like this bee in the blossom.

Hitch any horse to my wagon,
give me a wide open track,
give me a bottle of Bourbon, friend,
and I won't ever be back.

I'm going over that mountain
far away from this claim.
I've spent my days in tunnels dark
and the rocks all know my name.

The chain that lowers the ore carts,
the chain that binds men to gold.
Chains have grown where my hands were.
I'm chained to the mother lode.

For some men the mine's a cruel mistress,
they court her with lust and regret.
The timber's groan, the ringing of stone
is a love song they cannot forget.

I came a young man of 25 years,
I'll leave by the same muddy street.
Torn and tattered the coat on my back,
bloody the boots on my feet.

Hitch any horse to my wagon,
give me a wide open track,
give me a bottle of Bourbon, friend,
and I won't ever be back.

What passes for intensity in an Apis mellifera? 

I know she's blurry, but that just serves to capture the moment as this honeybee comes in for a landing on a spread of Valerian blooms. Take one look in her eye and you'll have the answer to the question. In fact, I've never seen a honeybee look anything but intense, at least not during the month of June. There's just too much work to be done.

Come late September, these creatures grow sluggish. It may be exhaustion, or just old age. I'll stop short of projecting human emotions on this insect, but when I encounter bees at the edge of the frost zone and watch them climb through spent greenery in a desultory search, I think of nothing so much as resignation. I can look forward to ski season; the bee, not so much.

Hence, intensity. Things are blooming; there's work to be done, and done right now.

From the bee's-eye view, this budding dill blossom bespeaks anticipation. It's a meal in preparation; it's sex on a stick, bulging under the aromatic, fern-like leaves I'll soon gather and dry. In the meantime, I take great pleasure in getting down to the level of the bee and visiting the natural architecture of the plant. By tomorrow, that structure will have changed, burgeoned out in shape and purpose. Only close observation is rewarded.

The June garden is full of such transitory pleasures. Here we are leaving the penumbra of summer solstice, phasing toward the heat of July and the promised "monsoon" season of the American Southwest, with its blazing morning sun and big-shouldered afternoon clouds that unleash torrents and finish with rainbows.

Eggplants, chili peppers, and summer squash are all fruiting up, and of course, the early tomatoes. Note the precise moment in time captured here as the dessicated blossom, its purpose served, hangs by the thinnest thread from the bulging green fruit. Moments after I snapped this photo, the thread gave way in a breeze. A garden is in constant flux.

I put in five hours on the patch yesterday—the kind of spending of energy that ultimately returns energy. It was sensory overload—the scents of the herbs and flowering plants, the taste and texture of the sugarpod peas and strawberries I grazed, the interplay of light and color from all angles, the soft swarming of bees in the just opened blossoms of carrot plants.

When I knocked off work around 2 p.m., the hot Colorado sun finally driving me out of the rows, I sat back with a cold, home-brewed Bock and felt pleasantly tired and stimulated. Maybe that's akin to the reverie of the bee.

The best time to harvest wild garlic—I'm experimenting with that. This pearly white head, no bigger than the tip of my thumb, burst with flavor. We all chewed a clove—mild heat and garlic tang, then a sweetness.

My source said wait until the stalks, which emerge curled, fully straighten. I picked four heads that were the  first to do it and then let them dry a couple of days until their outer layers were a papery. It may be best to give these several days before you mash them into a salsa or sauce, but as an object in the hand, they are  beautiful to behold—every bit as enticing an image as a tenacious ladybug on the sheepwire.

This year's garden is chock full of these wonderful creatures. I find them on leaves on fencing on stems in bright sun and dim pockets. I've actually watched a ladybug, male or female I'll never know, chew its way through an of aphid, which caused me to actually speak aloud a thank you.

It's a challenge to establish a fully functioning organic garden with beneficial insects in balance with pests. Great care must be taken with soils, garden waste, and remedies for pests. I use only mild soap to combat a stubborn infestation of aphids or flea beetles, the two main troublemakers in my vegetable garden. Now, 20 years into this particular patch of garden, I have good balance: a healthy population of ladybugs to clean up the neighborhood and pollinators to make an orgy of the place on summer afternoons.

We've wallowed in strawberries over the last two weeks. As I've said before, I bring a cup of water to the patch and I sit with my wife and each eat a handful of the most delicious, tart-sweet wild strawberries to mark summer solstice. The present moment is the best, eh?

But the garden changes. The strawberries will soon taper off, even as the golden pod peas come in.

The violet and white blossoms sport a yellow eye and from that bursts the thin, sweet pea. Few make it to the house—we simply graze them for a snack. They'll peak in a week or so and then taper off as June turns to July heat.

The first tomato fruits are setting up well—marble-sized green fruits breaking out on the Bloody Butcher vines. A half dozen other varieties are in hot pursuit, the plants now rising 2-3' high and in need of tethering to a good stake or trellis.

When will the first ones ripen? I suspect before another month passes we'll have an early wave off these first bushes, and then the 18 plants I've got (count 'em, baby) will go big. I'll pull full baskets of fruit out, maybe 12-15 lbs, all through August. Those we don't eat fresh we'll skin, de-seed, and chop before freezing. Talk to me in January when I pull several pounds out as the base for a marinara sauce.

For now, though, it's about patience and persistence. The eggplant blossoms are setting and the Italian pole beans look intensely focused on climbing high up the tripod trellis.

Perhaps best of all, I took out my molcajete today--a broad lavastone mortar and pestle. Soon I'll be able to roast some of those garlic and mash them into paste, then mash in some chili peppers and have the base for a fresh salsa.

It's been, so far, a fantastic early growing season on the Front Range. The one brief hail last week didn't devastate and the warm nightime temps—up to 60 degrees or more—are setting the whole garden afire with fruit. It's a beautiful thing to behold.

The heat arrived this week—a three-day wave of liquid sun and humidity that hauled the eggplants and peppers into a growth spurt. The timing was perfect; everything is established in the garden and ready for prodigious growth. And you know the heat is real when the peppers blossom before mid-June.

But these pulses of heat have been laced with afternoon and evening showers. Tonight, a massive cell of thunderstorms grew angry just east of here, spawning tornado warnings in a community called Last Chance. We caught the torn edge of the storm—a 20 minute rain that cooled the neighborhood nicely.

Its effect on the garden was remarkable. Nothing had wilted on this warm day, as the garden will do some July afternoons, but when the rain soaked leaf and soil alike, things were visibly refreshed. Colors deepened, aromas flourished and blended, and life surged.

The strawberry patch was positively glowing in yellow sun. It happens that the strawberries are peaking. None is bigger than the tip of my thumb but the flavor is crazy—tart and clean and vibrant, like a wild strawberry ought to be.

The point here is that this particular flavor can only be had for, at most, about ten days a year. These berries will be good just that long, and while their arc will carry them through the end of the month, they won't taste better than they do this very moment. None ever make it to the kitchen; I feed them directly to neighborhood kids, dinner guests, my wife, myself.

The pole beans are climbing, as is the lazarus vine—a grapevine I thought was dead. It wasn't, but I only learned that when I found it growing out of the garbage can where I'd tossed its main root weeks earlier. It's now in its third summer, and I'm convinced each spring that winter has killed it. Then . . .

Things are kicking into high gear. I Butcher Boy tomato sports nine—count 'em—nine blossoms on one stem alone.

It's true that a storm like the one that slid east of here tonight could just as well sweep through this neighborhood of mine. Rain is good but wind and hail can wreck a patch of vegetables in a swift, thrashing minute. What happens, happens. But meanwhile, it's good to appreciate what's growing and fruiting, one day at a time.

I was standing in the middle of downtown Los Angeles on a fine sunny day in June. Just as the tree was about to eat me, I heard a harsh, croaking voice emanating as if from underwater. Because it was.

"Hey you," the voice said. "Yeah, you."

It seemed damned unlikely the frog was actually speaking to me, but I'm open-minded, I guess. So I looked right at him and said, "You talking to me," and somewhere DeNiro shivered.

The frog, however, did not shiver. In fact, he moved not at all. But he did say, "You realize that tree is about to eat you, right?"

I hadn't thought about that, but it was LA, the frog was speaking English, so it seemed reasonable that the tree might be both omnivorous and hankering for a snack. I stepped back.

"Smart move," said another voice, this one slick and bright yellow in tone.

"You're a fish," I said. "I'm actually hearing your voice, and you're a fish."

"Not just any fish," the voice said. "I am your lucky fish. Your very lucky fish."

I did not know what that might mean so I said, "What exactly does that mean?" Just then, as the tree was about to eat me and the frog was still motionless, the fish vanished. "So much for luck," I said to no one in particular.

"Oh, what are you complaining about?" This was yet a third voice, coming from somewhere behind me and along a wall covered with glossy green leaves.

I followed the sound until I came upon this fellow, fixed on his perch, eyes closed and mouth open in this silly look of surprise. It seemed a reasonable risk to take so I addressed the Green Man directly. "That's a silly look of surprise, sir," I said.

"Ah, you have a keen sense of the obvious," came the reply. "Now, while you're standing there, do you think you could move a little to the left?"

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because you're blocking my view," he said. I quickly turned around to see and all was made clear.

"I guess you'd like to look at the lyre," I said.

"Precisely," he replied, and I stepped to the left.

"It's a nice lyre," I said.

"Indeed, indeed," said the Green Man. "Just like the one Orpheus used to play. You've seen them depicted, no doubt, on countless Grecian Urns."

I nodded. "But what I want to know is, can you play the thing?"

He snorted. "Can't you see, I have no arms? What would you have me do, lick the strings?"

"I suspect you have no tongue, either," I said. "But isn't that a lovely flower?"

The End.

It's about balance. It's about imagination. It's about space.

I spent some time recently with a good friend—something I used to take for granted but not any more. I was out of town on a short working vacation and when I snapped the above photo, we were hiking up a hill outside Salida, Colorado. I'd done a reading the previous night before a small but enthusiastic local audience and I told them how much I love their mountain home. "Your river has a beautiful town," I said.

Working vacation may seem like a conundrum. For this one, I spent most of four days in meetings and readings and deep discussions with some very smart, very creative people. By the end of it, I was both physically drained and mentally chock-full of new insights and ideas. These friends and colleagues were gathered at my request to help build what we hope will be the definitive anthology of Colorado literature, past and present.

It turns out I'd scheduled this meeting to take place immediately after the end of a very long academic year. I had just completed teaching over 200 students in 11 separate courses over the previous 9 months. For those who know, that is a staggering load of work. For those who don't I can only say that every course was a writing course and every student produced significant work, all of which required my detailed, close evaluation and grading.

It took about all I had and by the time I turned in the last of my grades and closed my office door for the summer, I was running on fumes. So stepping from that into the round of meetings and events that followed was an act of faith—faith that I could manage just a bit more.

Usually, at the end of a school year, I spend a week or so pursuing what I call "hammock time." That is, I park my butt in a hammock in my back yard and rest, nap, read for pleasure, sip cool drinks, etc. This provides me the chance to decompress. It's a metaphor, but an apt one. Intensive teaching compresses the mind/spirit/body. It can absolutely squish a person. It can kill your creativity. So it becomes necessary to decompress at the end if one is to regain balance and energy, and open up the imagination.

This time, hammock time didn't occur as it usually does. I had no one to blame but myself since . . . I had called the meeting for this time. I was feeling flatter than a penny on the rails but when I saw that tree, brilliantly painted against the backdrop of the scrub and mountains, I decompressed in an instant. I found my bearings.

Maybe it was actually happening during the intellectual conversations, which took me in new directions because I was not the teacher but the student. Maybe it was the long, far ranging conversations with my friend Pete, greased as they were with red wine and conducted to the soundtrack of belly laughter, the kind that drives the air from the lungs and tears from the eyes.

It could even have been the morning sunrise after just a few hours sleep. There had been rain, sleet, and snow in previous days, but the weather finally broke and that particular morning I sat on the front porch of my buddy's home and let the warmth of the sun chase the ache of too little sleep right off the top of my head.

Whatever it was—maybe all these things together—I came home feeling free of some burdens, my carcass renewed enough to begin again. There are poems to write, a garden to nurture, some love to exchange, and fresh possibilities waiting in the summer months.

It's good to be free and open to what comes next, purring loud and as curious as a fat cat checking out the stranger suddenly perched on his favorite porch chair.

These leaves of French tarragon are as succulent as they look, but our eyes are insufficient to capture what's hidden: flavors of pepper, citrus, and an earthy herbal base note that defies description. Just one thin leaf an inch long, crushed in the palm, releases enough scent to perfume a room.

Imagine what happens when a cup of leaves is blended with olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and fresh-grated parmigiano reggiano, then spread over a plate of homemade fettucine, served alongside a steaming loaf of sourdough and a glass of Chianti.

Hidden flavor, contained—it's what we patiently awaited all winter, and less patiently through this cool, sluggish spring season. Now, in early May, the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies is relinquishing frosty nights and while there's yet snow in the forecast for this week, the tarragon is hearty and will make it through fine.

So will the salad garden, with its collection of greens like these shallots, bursting up on the border between Red Rapids lettuce and Bordeaux spinach.

That spinach itself is an experiment. I've never tried this variety but I can see already that it's a winner. By week's end, I'll be serving it up, topped with a few mandarin oranges and a vinaigrette

Gardening is about potential. The vegetable gardener looks out on a frozen patch in February and knows that with planning and preparation, he can coax amazing flavors out of the earth. It's some work to do so, but it's not that hard. What was most challenging, at least to this gardener and at least early on, was the waiting. Patience was never my strong suit as a young person and gardens have been my mentor in this regard.

Speaking of mentors, check out the OnionGnome. Damn it if he doesn't stand still every time I come around, but something tells me the minute I fall asleep, he registers the unconscious state and sets to work.

No, I'm not losing it. I'm just setting up a point here. It has to do with creativity in general. I've done a handful of workshops referencing Stanley Kunitz's marvelous book, The Wild Braid, written in the last years of his 100-year-life. He wrote about his two passions: poetry and gardening.

I've found similar tracks in my life, though I've got a long way to go compared to Kunitz, on many levels. But I keep finding parallels between poetry and gardening, and it feels like I've only just seen the edge of that, with much more to discover.

Just last week I found myself doing a phone interview with a young college student who is working on the ethnography of Denver's poets. It seemed an intriguing line of inquiry and I agreed to talk with her and offer what I could. I'm hardly an expert, but four years as the city's poet laureate did teach me some things and provide insights.

And though I didn't use the analogy in our conversation, any "poetry society" is a bit like a garden, with diverse plants, some in competition, some in cooperation, some in relative isolation. They bloom at different times, in different colors and configurations. The fruits are to taste—readers pick what they like, ignore what they don't, or in the worst cases, seek to choke out or cast shade on what threatens them.

But each plant has potential.

That's a strawberry there, waiting to happen. With the right conditions—and in my garden, the conditions are very right for this plant—this blossom will fruit into a delicious, thumb-sized, red packet of wild strawberry flavor far more intense than anything you will ever buy in a store. So I keep the conditions right, encouraging high acid soil in this patch and growing garlic nearby, which seems to enhance the health of the strawberry plants and vice-versa, (a technique called companion planting).

I think it's healthy to cultivate different kinds of poets near one another. I think we can appreciate the garlic poets for thier pungency and the strawberry poets for their sweetness, and that it diminishes neither to open the appreciative consciousness a bit broader.

But if you have much exposure to the poetry community, you know how it often goes. As laureate I advocated broader acceptance and inclusiveness, and for so doing took more than a few shots from self-important folks. Screw 'em. I get that the PoBiz is for some all about careerism, advancement, and scrabbling for a bigger piece of a small pie.

Anyway, it's not about me, it's about cultivating a garden of poetry all around us, and the big winners are the readers who might get to enjoy a better, diverse poetry permaculture. I feel rather sorry for the bastards who write in front of a mirror and feel it necessary to choke off anything that isn't like them, creating the horror of a monoculture that dominates so many academies.

I don't know if I was helpful when I shared these thoughts with the scholar of sociology. She seemed excited about the idea of broadening, rather than narrowing, what we allow and appreciate in the Poet's Garden. Ultimately, I'll keep looking for ways to work along these lines, building connections and enjoying the panoply of flavors, colors, and scents—in the garden, and in the poems.

The forsythia blooms in a quiet corner of my yard. No window looks out upon it so it's not in my thoughts on any regular basis.

I can spend a winter of mornings staring out at the mini-glacier that creeps out from the garage shadow, marking its gradual moistening and shrinkage on warm days as the sun mounts higher and ruins its edge.

The stunned soil in the garden doesn't change. Once the snow retreats, it remains a tableau of pale dirt under the contorted stalks of eggplants and chili peppers that I should have pulled in November. Nothing changes there until I change it. By hand.

But in that quiet corner, out of sight, the forsythia has plans of its own. Yesterday, I thought to myself that it must be ready to bloom so I walked around to that corner and was met with a blaze of yellow. 

It's the first real splash of color in my yard. I always intend to put bulbs in the ground in the fall and I never manage it. You can see a pattern here: in the fall, I'm just too damned busy with teaching to find the shreds of time I need to do even minimal garden tending. Generally, I surrender in September and just let things fall where they will, then spend the rest of autumn and winter hearing Warren Zevon chanting, "Shoulda done, shoulda done, we all sigh."

But the forsythia always rescues me in early April. Its joy is all out of proportion to the still-chilly nights, the indifferent sun of spring, and the teasing snows that can yet bow it and ruin most of the blooms, as happened last year just when it was just breaking out.

Meanwhile, in the garden itself, the hops are already running amok, pouring out of the ground like a fountain of barbed wire. Asparagus are poking their little purple phallic selves out of the dirt. The salad garden I put in last week is showing up—sprouts of lettuce, spinach, and mustard greens among the emergent stalks of onions.

In the herb bed, stunned parsley and tarragon are rousing. The strawberry plants look newly assertive and green. Garlic is pounding up; chives are already seasoning our omelettes in the morning. Clearly, the season is accelerating and all the promise of the garden hangs in the balance. The skies may be grey above today, but I'm looking forward to answering the call and spending those hours among the growing things, time that smooths out the rough days ahead.