Robert Savino Oventile

Rattlesnakes

Robert Savino Oventile / August 1, 2023

Oddly warm rains bring us out. From our growing number far outliers enter dens bereft of our presence for untold generations. Coiled in darkness, we lick odors from the balmy air and, sensing an infrared glow, strike. We entwine in shade, our heat a sun gift.

Grey, bare yucca stocks accent the hills’ stark ribs. The level horizon shimmers blue, the air hot and still. Condors trace circles in the cloudless sky. On arid sand and pebbles a pronghorn skull rests, scoured white. Clear and sharp, the rattle sounds.

Before thinking, below knowing, the image, audible, visual, arrives, goes to work and, in belief, there’s a response, a reaction, a response. Abysses are for leaping into rather than over. Yet these leaps remain distinct in their contingent occasions.

Not for lack of sunshine, our range contracts, fragments. The ground holds strange vibrations. The rat increases. Boulders piled down the canyon’s sundown side a few generations ago offer dens. Stream water changes taste. More and more heat.

“This summer, on a canyon hike, my wife and I stopped still: a rattlesnake, crossing the trail, almost as thick as the old water pipe it was crawling over. Biggest rattler we’ve seen. To scoot by the spot where it vanished, we hugged the other side of the path.”

Robert Savino Oventile hikes Eaton Canyon regularly. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Upstairs at Duroc, and The Denver Quarterly. He is coauthor with Sandy Florian of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down (Atmosphere, 2021). Robert is the current Poet Laureate of Local News Pasadena.

Poetry: © Robert Savino Oventile 2023
Photography: © Susan Hopkins

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Fire in the Canyon

Robert Savino Oventile / May 1, 2023

The Nature Center, its desert-landscape courtyard with yucca and manzanita, its office, its lecture hall, its classroom and display cases, stuffed birds, and the tarantula hawk preserved and pinned for examination, all reduced to ash.

From seven leagues offshore, look: a swath of orange and yellow blazes on the horizon, a sloping mesa, poppy-covered, signaling land, una tierra de fuego, though hardly an empty wilderness, more a vast garden wild tended since time immemorial.

Though both consume oxygen, though both were set by hand (one with intention, one without), though both put the deer to flight, regardless, both fires remain distinct in how, softly and truly, each burning landscape lies on the eye:

Beneath the oaks yellow and orange flames dance slowly through the understory, clearing crowded saplings, dry twigs, and fallen leaves, singeing down grasses for their more vigorous spring return, then dying out. Gray wisps drift in the clear air.

A view through a windshield: The sun reveals a sky of darkness and smoke, the Santa Anas ride in from the Great Basin, hard gusts bending palm trees (fronds thrash and writhe), and, in the distance, the canyon glows lava-red.

Poetry: © Robert Savino Oventile 2022
Photography: © Edgar McGregor

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Deer in the Canyon

Robert Savino Oventile / December 22, 2022

To the last glaciation’s beat, ungulate populations diverged, converged, and into the recent whole (now a difficult memory) birthed mule deer, who vied there for acorns with a mortal yet respectful relation. Salmon and trout swam the rivers and streams.

The Caltech rocketeers, the shuttling vehicles, the thunderous static firings with promethean flames, the 3,000 personnel, the 24/7 industrialism (a million-plus rocket motors!), the concrete bunkers storing 250 tons of rocket fuel: before these the deer retreated.

Light appears, wishes simplify: to persist in the burgeoning light allows. But what of light’s ambivalent implication in coming and going? Dawn and dusk both draw deer to activity, yet light’s breaking and waning remain distinct in their moods.

At dawn, warm light fills the canyon. Antlers appear among the sage scrub, then ears. A buck’s head lifts, dips from sight, lifts again, dips. A sound: bleating, as of a fawn. A buck’s head lifts, wary. With as much speed as silence, a dart finds its target.

At dusk, amidst oaks’ deep shade, deer browse for acorns, grasses, forbs. A hiker approaches quietly then turns around, raising a hand holding a phone. With a brilliant flash, a gadget delivers the hiker, the deer, and the oaks from time.

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