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Christmas Raven
Our narrow street is still grassy and
clear
when we begin the drive, the car
veering
easily off Laurel, past trees ablaze,
past lawns grazed by glowing wire
reindeer,
up, onto the winding mountain roadways,
our tires spinning, bumper hollowing
the white beginning to fill the air,
now
our wipers are going swishsha-swishsha,
as we move to serious weather, snow
everywhere feathering headlights,
the glass.
We drive through the white-dark for
hours until
tinseled trees on their lawns again
sparkle,
then pull up, crackling, to park
below
the pale blue neon blazing “HOSPITAL”
for all to see through the flurries
of snow.
Upstairs, wired into the sea green
wall,
you lay swaddled in white cloth where
icefall
has numbed your toes and fingers,
and nurses
scurry back and forth in the lit
hallways
trundling drugs to their midnight
charges.
Whoever found you out there, stiff,
frozen,
has by this time removed your down-battened
full body suit––outer space cosmonaut’s
gear you wore against cold, as talisman
when you set out on your long mountain
walk.
We coo our greetings and sing your
praises
as the ceiling above you fluoresces,
and outside by the bright twinkling
pinewoods
the silent Thunderbird creaks and
drowses,
breath still steamy beneath the ticking
hood.
He will be the one to carry us out,
back to our lesser hills, windy and
steep,
planted in fruit trees and vines,
the heaven’s
ground too warm by far for this snow
and sleet,
where he too abides: thunderbird,
raven.
Spree on the
San Francisco Bay
Here, the white cliffs
of I. Magnin
rise from dunes above
the bedrock.
Palaces of couture, immense,
fragrant, they rise into
a sea
of air, sweeping fresh
sands up from
the beach over dead volcanoes,
as shoppers gather in
grottoes,
on the berm of Polk and
Market,
gliding past mimes and
beggars bowed
on shoes, rags specking
the city.
Now, in spring, she, too,
wakes, her heels
tapping the marble, she
spins through
the racks, spending, and
emerges,
blinking, into the sunlight
in
silk, cashmeres and taffeta,
all
thought washed clean and
smoothed away.
A hand to that face, she
crosses,
streets flashing hot,
tinted metal.
One day, she'll wake to
the fissure
of bone in her skull;
like wintering
Chinook, she, too, will
swim silted,
salty waters and flash
out of
the wide sea in recognition,
finning the delicate waters,
the San Joaquins: like
this hook-jawed
salmon spawned of gods
the Yaki
sang of, their bones scattered
once more
in the preserving sea,
this king––
homing.
Rain at Christmas
Advent brought rain, slicking
the roads and dimming
light over the valley;
in town, lights burned
over the transoms
and in the Yule trees;
the Mattole spilled its
banks,
shimmered through gray.
When rain paused, smoke
broke from our rooftops;
on hills, red cedars
fattened till Spring,
when axe and saw would
fell them one by one.
At home, we fattened
on Porter House rolls,
and stole looks at gifts
tied in bright string
by the lit balsam.
Where would elves go
once the alders were cut?
Raining cats and dogs
that Christmas stained
a deeper black the black
spruce
neat-stacked in the mill
yards,
and on the mire paths,
no stars
were seen, no footfall
heard
under the dinning rain.
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Breaking Bread
On a narrow lover's
lane
in spring, a buzz of children
came into the open,
trailed by a man and woman.
The wind from the sea
carried the children's
voices
across the high, bald
hills of
yellow grasses rolling
on
like the folds of bread
loaves
sprinkled with black oak.
The wind blew the children's
hair
across their faces, and
drove
up the collars on their
coats.
The wind had long ago
cleared
the landscape of spruce
and fir,
growing inland now, clustered.
Hills rose between beach
and wood,
halving the coastline,
having
it again at each ravine
So Alonzo and his wife,
straggling up a knoll,
leaving
shade for sunlight, felt
they, too, had been halved
by the children flurrying
ahead
on lanes of loose gravel.
Bound to that place of
wind
on the Mattole's granite
outcrops, every day they
made peace with their
lot:
he chopping the wood for
her fires,
she letting them cool
awhile,
till evening brought the
time
for the breaking of the
bread
of loaves already cooled.
Berkeley Botanical
Gardens
Grey-green, squat or spindly
these red bark trees recall
the dry Mayacamas
of my distant childhood––
the dark, narrow woods
of
manzanita snagging
hand-knit hand-me-downs
and nipping at my heels
as with feral cats and
coyotes, I ran wild––
despite mid-day hunger
ever swerving off from
the street that ended
in
the green flat-roofed
house where
my bed waited for me
a trough of warm green
sea
in a room cold-rattling
beneath rising voices.
The ground itself lifts
me
now after all these years
come down from fear: I
walk
the paths of these gardens
California flora—
fescue, timber oat grass
and Mendocino sedge––
to the crest––a sudden
field of roses, ripe with
prickly beauty whose scent
yet penetrates the dusk.
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