jogging Arizona, where the world isn't strange to you   Pounding down a desert path, I touch almost nothing of this strange place, this dawn, this valley of the sun. I think too much, too much, too much. . . . Then, with my race half run, I spot a bush ablaze with life -- white fluff and chrome yellow petals like insect wings, (nothing to do with me, and everything), never long resting from the summertough business of survival. But in this brief lapse of heat, this "winter," the flower shows a new beauty to me, one I can't even name (and neither can you), and though I'm no citizen of this desert, I can see, and once I've seen, I can't -- I won't -- unsee.     © Michael Fleming Mesa, Arizona January 1995