Cartographies

The View from Mt. Baldy

66 TheView from Mt. Baldy Beauty here takes itself for granted. Just see how the baby blue eyes blink felicitously, knowing full well their days are briefly numbered and that, being small as sequins, only the carpenter ants will shoulder them aside. Spring sun flatters itself now— it falls askance on golden wall flowers, on paintbrush, prickly phlox, on clumps of orange monkey flowers surprising the canyon walls where April’s icicles have left behind candle-dripped stains bleeding brightly through the ore. Cucamonga Peak,Timber Mountain, and all the attendant ridges of granite, snag themselves on lake-sized clouds; their power is the subversion of time, a tale of erosions, tremors, of the desire to preside, to grow out of finite form into infinite abstraction. A procession of white-robed pilgrims, the yuccas, ascends the crumbling terraces that burgeon wildly with mountain lavender and penstemon. Indifferent to beauty or perfection, they ignite the high meadows, their huge, white bells swinging slightly above great orbs of spears, a halo of bees floating above them like smoke. ...