The Knife Edge of Spring

"To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily."

-from Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

In AZ, the spring green up of grasses and trees makes use of a narrow window of time between declining winter moisture and increasing summer heat.  Our redbud trees blooms for three or four days (this year, from April 26-29), the lilac bushes hardly last much longer, and the spring green up of weedy lawns is over by the end of May.  June is the dry season in Arizona.  June is when spring dies.

The knife edge of spring in Arizona can be seen in the biomass production.  For example, the Rangeland Analysis Platform shows that peak spring growth in Dugas, AZ in 2020 lasted approximately 3 weeks, from 4/1 to Earth Day 4/22.  By May, the growth of the annual green up was already in freefall.  More examples can be seen in this previous blog post using RAP to investigate biomass production variability from year to year.  

Phenology Mapping

The National Phenology Network's Visualization Tool can be used to follow the spring green up via Accumulated Growing Degree Days (AGDD), which work by adding up all of the days and temperatures above some minimum threshold for growth, usually 32 F for cool season plants (winter annuals, cool season grasses, willows and cottonwoods and other early spring plants) or 50 F for warm season plants (mesquite, acacia, and other warm season trees like Chilopsis, walnut, and warm season grasses and forbs).

AGDD Details

A "growing degree day" (GDD) is calculated by subtracting the threshold temperature (T) from the average temperature for each day when the minimum temperature is above the threshold temperature of 32 or 50 degrees. 

Average T = (Maximum T - Minimum T)  / 2

GDD = Average T - Threshold T

 Accumulated growing degree days (AGDD) simply adds up all of the GDD since the beginning of the year.

AGDD = GDD (January 1) + GDD (January 2) + … + GDD (yesterday)

To use the NPN Visualization Tool for AGDD, choose Map>Base Layer>Category: Daily temperature accumulations>Layer:Current Day.

AGDD Example - 32 F

The figure below shows AGDD around Prescott, AZ from a threshold temperature of 32 as 5/2/24.  Most of the map shows AGDD of about 2,000; since there have been about 120 days since the beginning of the year, that works out to an average daily temperature of 48 degrees F (2,000/120 + 32 =  48).  Of course, some areas have been warmer than that and some have been cooler:  

Phenology AGDD from 32 F 

1,600 - cottonwoods leafed out (Prescott)

1,800 - still winter grasses not green (Kirkland junction)

2,200 -  annual grasses very green, early spring wildflowers blooming (Dugas)

2,245 - mesquite not leafed out yet, annual grasses still somewhat green (Yava)

2,500 - mesquite leafed out, annual grasses brown (Date)

2,800 mesquite flowering (Congress)

AGDD Example 50 F

Or maybe a 50 degree threshold better shows mesquite and grass green up? The average daily temperatures, of course, are the same, but the different threshold yields much lower AGDDs, mostly in the low 100's.  On this map, light green area are grasses already brown and mesquite leafed out, green areas actually are green fields of annual grasses, whereas white and blue are areas where willows, cottonwoods, and elms have leafed out, but herbaceous plants are just barely getting started.

Phenology AGDD from 50 F 

240 - oaks turning brown (Kirkland)

350 - mesquite not greened up yet, annual grasses and forbs green (Dugas)

400 - mesquite not leafed out yet, annual grasses still somewhat green (Yava)

550 - mesquite leafed out, annual grasses brown (Date)

800 - mesquite flowering (Congress)

AGDD Anomalies

The examples above of specific phenology AGDD values can be used in conjunction with NPN's Visualization Tool to predict plant growth stage.  Also, it is possible to use NPN's Visualization Tool to highlight geographic areas that may be ahead or behind the usual spring green up using the "Anomaly" visualization.  In the figure below, anomaly from 32 F AGDD, it can be seen that the Kirkland valley, Black Canyon City, and the Verde valley are behind (blue) normal phenology, whereas Prescott valley and especially the area north of Bagdad are ahead (red) normal phenology.  

"Life in itself 

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

-from Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Ourselves"

When the throaty calls of sandhill cranes
echo across the valley, when the rimrock flares
incandescent red, and the junipers
are flames of green on the shortgrass hills,

in that moment of last clear light
when the world seems ready to speak its name,
meet me in the field alongside the pond.
Without careers for once, without things to do,

without dreams or anger or the rattle of fears,
we'll ask how it can be that we walk this ground
and know that we walk, alive in a world
that didn't have to be beautiful, alive

in a world that doesn't have to be.
With no answers, just ourselves and silence,
we'll listen for the song that waits to be learned,
the song that moves through the passing light.

-John Daniel

Ode to Arizona Riparian Forests

sinking deep
consciousness
lying alongside
pool

mellow yellow
golden glow
desert water in the desert
running

embodied cognition

walking quietly not moving

letting the rush catch up
little round blue gray beauties (birds)
(words) (life)

taste air --- smell sensuous

always arriving
finding some flowers
growing: rock cleft riparian
Mimulus (Monkey Flowers, appropriately)

Trampling off-trail
these zoo grounds
fantastic wrinkled skin of the Earth
bare bones, softened by
sponge blackened hummus crevices
rosy glow blushing
hunched rocks, boulders, cliffs
until that tint too has faded

Where will you be?
when the sun comes out
the 'shine soaks in

Good

Tree boles bumped and bruised
turning flood slides rock
ancestors, clutching,
trampled under, stampede.

Great Sand Dunes Vegetation Mapping

Merlin Enthralled (Richard Wilbur)

From GRSA

In a while they rose and went out aimlessly riding.
Leaving their drained cups on the table round.
Merlin, Merlin, their hearts cried, where are you hiding?
In all the world was no unnatural sound.

From GRSA

Mystery watched them riding glade by glade;
They saw it darkle from under leafy brows;
But leaves were all its voice, and squirrels made
An alien fracas in the ancient boughs.

From GRSA

Once by a lake-edge something made them stop.
Yet what they found was the thumping of a frog,
Bugs skating on the shut water-top,
Some hairlike algae bleaching on a log.

From GRSA

Gawen thought for a moment that he heard
A whitehorn breathe "Niniane." That Siren's daughter
Rose in a fort of dreams and spoke the word
"Sleep", her voice like dark diving water;

From GRSA

And Merlin slept, who had imagined her
Of water-sounds and the deep unsoundable swell
A creature to bewitch a sorcerer,
And lay there now within her towering spell.

Slowly the shapes of searching men and horses
Escaped him as he dreamt on that high bed:
History died; he gathered in its forces;
The mists of time condensed in the still head

From GRSA

Until his mind, as clear as mountain water,
Went raveling toward the deep transparent dream
Who bade him sleep. And then the Siren's daughter
Received him as the sea receives a stream.

From GRSA

Fate would be fated; dreams desire to sleep.
This the forsaken will not understand.
Arthur upon the road began to weep
And said to Gawen, "Remember when this hand

Once haled a sword from stone; now no less strong
It cannot dream of such a thing to do."
Their mail grew quainter as they clopped along.
The sky became a still and woven blue.

From GRSA

Santa Fe: Land of the Prius and Suburu

How long after sunset does the Green Flash occur?

Have you seen the shimmering ghost clouds that effervesce in the black sky an hour or more after sunset?

Some say they are a hundred, a thousand miles up.

The sky definitely shades in every color of the rainbow, red sunsets fade to green and then to blue and black.

Stars cover more than their 180 degree share of the heavens.

The Jemez and the Ortiz and the Sandia and the Sangre de Cristo.

The mountains here create their own weather; each ranch has its own weather.

Quiet city of polite dogs and narrow walled streets; enclosed or exclosed? You can't tell if you're inside or outside the brown adobe walls.
The billboards all advertise watches and jewelry, while cows chew cholla for miles around.
In Santa Fe.

Homage

If this sure animal approaching us
from a different direction had our kind
of consciousness, he’d drag us around
in his wake. But to the animal, his being
is infinite, incomprehensible, and blind
to his condition, pure, like his outward gaze.
And where we see the future, he sees
all, himself in all, and whole forever.

And yet the weight and care of one great sadness
lies on this warm and watching creature.
Because what often overwhelms us
Also clings to him — the memory
that what we so strive for now may have been
nearer, truer, and its attachment to us
infinitely tender, once. Here all is distance,
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems drafty and a hybrid.

excerpt from The Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke. Translation by ___________(?)

Foreshadowing the Puerco River

I feel like we're going off to war. Moving equipment, each day more preparation that builds on the gear and supplies and tools we've already shuffled and hauled and schlepped all over the landscape. Each step requires previous and prepares further. This is my third tour: a whole new river flowing through a new watershed held in the lap of new mountains, mesas, and wild country: big water, thickets, and quicksand. A vast brown landscape that requires new color words: burnt umber, ochre, chocolate, burgundy. New growth shows green around the edges.

To get to our encampment you take the exit for Placitas, but go west up the long slow slope of Rio Grande alluvium, while the hills of the Jemez slowly embrace you, and you wind between redrock mesas with deep canyons and cliffs. Onto the Rez, past White Mesa's warm pastels, past the arroyos full of cold salt, unnaturally blighted. Past Zia pueblo, past the dirt parking lot full of cars and people, lit by the neon LOVE RANCH sign, past San Ysidro. Into dark silence, past Cabezon Peak, solitary, unmistakable, dominating the first view (looking South) into the Puerco valley.

Puerco; an ugly name that changed the place to fit it. This used to be the "breadbasket of New Mexico", before the 1800's chewed it to dust, until it had nothing left to give, and it was abandoned... it had served as the hearth and heart of the Anasazi pueblo people, whose empire encompassed the thousand-roomed ruins at Chaco, still abandonded and brooding in a valley to the Northwest above the Puerco river.

You will find me standing there, breathing into the spaces, planting trees.

Lime Night Life Light

Ah, back to the hammock

cold paws, correct breathing

shoulders relaxed
writing in bed, flowers
scattered around
my dark shape
amid
innumerable dark shapes
under an empty sky
full of fluttering
moths
whose white noise fills up the valley
called to my reading
my lime night life light
a babbling brook of half-heard ideas
while
I roam, hourless,
over the mornings and afternoons
of possible lives not lived
and possible patterns
of impossible sciences

the desert speaks I

the desert speaks &
the heat swallows you

there are mountains surrounding
to the northeast the rocks are black: "tucson"
as if balloons were inflated and popped
in a pool of molten lava
at the confluence of two dry rivers

we camp on the surface in billowing white tents
the ground crackles and pops
we spit watermellon seeds
cicadas lost in the pads of a prickly pear

"love and rely on the desert"

we camp amid the stranded fortresses of blasted, bygone greatness
mine tailings
mixed with broken
clay tablets, pueblos

a shared hallucination:
sun cuts through sparse leaves
many thin things, split apart
a few scattered hermitages and
six emaciated deer in a dry stream
too tired to run away
ghost paths over empty ground
waiting for the monsoon

it is hard to swallow here
the wind and
El sol y sombra,
Sonora

Learning the Shape of Clouds

"learning the shape
of clouds" not
that every moment
has to be extra
ordinary. Kick
some leaves.
The underside
of some rocks
pinecones and
pale
leaflitter on
the dark earth
but some days
there is just a single
dark cricket under
the rock and the
leaves make an empty
rustling.

I'm moving in the
right direction. Except
the fire in my
lower stomach and
the surge at the back
of the brain
and the eyelids
when breathing.
Your own footsteps
on the way back.
Tire tracks gradually
you hear only
the swish
of pants
inside the muffle
of hat and jacket

Thank-you for Your Help

because of you I walked out one last time
into the Baja sun and bright concrete surround
I said goodbye to nobody and thanked no one for their help
silently without moving my lips
no vibration on take-off
blink and then the clouds opened over Dallas
the grid-plan
welcome to the American machine
consumed and then the west Texas farmfields,
Guadalupe mountains, White Sands Nat'l Monument,
the rocky backbone of the continental divide,
islands perched in the sky,
home: a rusted plane by the runway
two beautiful women with perfect posture
walking away from me into the setting Tucson sun

things i found on a summer hike at a ski resort in the lower sierras

eye drops and a single dime and...

the drone of flies

economies of organisms, leaves, sticks and color

mountains

so white?

i thought there were clouds over on the horizon

will you write after their end?

record birds, heartbeats, melting snow

icecubes on the face, keep me awake

the hours field mice spend gnawing on nuts

dreams speeded up to cartoonishness

the way a bicycle amplifies someone running

white charcoal on the black foundations

a house gutted by red fire as tall as the green pine

arrows anchor the earth where the man, his wife, and their children stood

and what is money?

and can you add inside a black hole?

and

...a keychain thermometer, a tree covered in lady bugs,...

K visit

Memories of K

Winter sunlight limpid on the playground
spinning in circles
shocked on the electric fence
i remain unshockable
stuck on the roof
climbing the target
finding the car key
sunset on the car
back from mexico, arguing about diet (the new politics)
dehydrated go game w/ sweaty mexican musician

rock climbing ponatoc ridge,
rocky and dark
lost, smoking at Sanjay's
absence present as a palpable apparition
a semi-circular desk full of dictionaries
more than the some of stones
album leaf or coma lily?


foot found car key
slippers and shooting stars







Maxwell's demon ripples in the pool
hot tub to pool and back again
out of chaos, order
out of order, chaos

apples and goat cheese and turkish apricots
approach the glass. excellent. now turn around.

A Good Trip

a good trip in mexico





teddy bear forest
slow rhythm of sunsets
movement of light and mind




sever the connection between
mind and body
central nervous system
city and wilderness
boundaries









the desert landscape
cars
anchor to the world






this is the way it always is.
vacation.
straight from the horse's mouth





you can't escape 'cause
its always there
open minds
light stomachs






hands were made for this
eating more than an avocado
Sisyphus carrying a stone






driving into the circle of light
Tucson
eye rimmed with lashes





remembered dreams after
dozens of contrails
living a part in a scientific experiment
electrodes in my flesh and brain






shrouded dark moon figure
walking with a cane
against the stars









sunset needs color
irreducible
the synesthesia is constant




the first time
sliding around a subset
of the edges in the room
mistake change for control
and complexity for freedom








welcome to the moon