I live to eye that low
swing of the sun.
How to live is in
capturing each
glad sinking of the day fire.

Cloudy, orange glint,
then fading and lost
in night's long fear.

Perhaps I fear the long
darkness and want to be
present for the beginning
of the last time it occurs.

I miss many fine hours,
choosing worthless hours
for gazing at the stunning
blast of light, even when
the end of land is painted
bleakly gray, and my
friends behind my back say:

"He went to the
edge of glory
on such a dismal,
fog-filled afternoon".

I want to understand the forces
unfurling in a hurricane, but must
be content in my sheer ignorance.
I come to my same favorite place
one day to write, and the power
is gone. Then I come with
huge new ideas and want to
write like--well, like the wind--
and the wind has come up,
hurricane-like, and my penmanship
turns to scribble-pictures on paper.

I hide behind my truck and
behind a silver trash barrel,
but this hurricane wraps around
with a power no one can avoid.
The important things I have
reserved for saying, how will
they get said? At least, they're
not surfacing in this
day's storm-upset thinking.

Six Chinese kids lift
their heads above the
bluff where I look at angry
water. They wave to me.
I nod, but my hands grasp
the flapping paper tablet.
I hear their song-like tongue,
a chorus mixed with groaning gusts.
There is too much wind
coming from the west, from
the direction of China, so far away.

The long thin-handled edge
of the country, where many
have come to dip their
dipping cups and drink

from rivers diverted into
extreme long and lonely
farm-dedicated ditches,
from the pocketed geography
of blocked up Sierra streams:

how many ways we have
poured our water into
separate cups and worked
at ways to keep it from
its way of life-giving
and of natural flowing.

And now four spins
from the sweating sun,
our lake grounds cracking,
our ground tables slacking,
we must think how to suspend
our dippers, pour our
shared need back into
the source that kills
our thirst. Can we do
this as a people?

Share what is quickly
becoming scarce?
California, land that
brags of leadership--
can we show the world
a peaceable sipping?
All the rivers I ask
seem to answer never.

What you tell me
about your deep life
strikes me as what I have felt.
Our differences are not annoyances,
but magnify our tiniest
glowing ruby embers.

Were we brought here
from the same place?
Have we shared fathers?
Might we have
been together elsewhere,
beyond this star forest?

I can smell your voice
when you tilt one ear toward me.
That distant home from
whence we have arrived?
I want to go back when the keeper
of this palace of shallow wonder
requests my departure.

But you will be coming.
Won't you?
How else could we know
each other now if you
did not love me once
before in my words?

Even though your lips
hint a whisper of sorrow,
your eyes cast brilliant
shadows
into the destiny behind
my dream-thoughts.

“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”

― Homer, The Iliad

Since it never snows here
let's put down
these imaginary snowballs
of defense,
my love.

Yes, already the icicles
are melting
from your long hair

and I'm thirsty enough
for you
to drink the woman-flavored
broth
that puddles at your feet,

as soon as my own iced blood
begins to pour long
and again,
like a hundred pound sack
of salt
pouring through one pinhole
of flesh
into your savory broth.

Some names stay familiar a whole life even when
you know not much about them. Such is Touchet.
Did I ever stop here? No, I don't think for a minute,
but it's a place I passed going to see grandparents,

where there was farm and cousins and grandpa driving his
Deere tractor in the usual pheasant-corn field,
where life went on a thousand years for one who is
six or eight. I could pretend to smell hot rolls in

grandma's wood-burning stove beside the kitchen,
a picture of the Lord holding a sheep that wandered off
the prairie, and barn of jumping lofts and hay piled
high enough to feed the calves and fill the air with dust.

Touchet was not worth the effort to stop. It was the
half-way spot to somewhere else. "Where are we now?"
I'd ask. "Touchet",  then fall into the custom sleep,
no need yet to lift my head and guess how far

the miles to go. A placeholder of mind, a pause
in the beat of an eager heart. No pretty little
settled town with river running along the main;
Why is there such a place as Touchet?

It's not really hardly there, sort of a theological
holding tank to explain the empty space between
our house and grandma's. It could be on a map,
but why? I never saw a Touchet boundary,

only a sign on the empty railroad track. Poorly-
stacked buildings holding each other up in
drunken tango, the whole place hoboing a ride
on the Northern Pacific line. Even a runaway

train would not choose to make this stop
since nobody is there. Nothing is right. In
the middle of nowhere. If you would stop
nobody would notice you or care, as nothing

happened here and you couldn't really call
yourself alive and it would be a mistake to
think so, unless you were a road-flattened
dog or coyote or snake looking for a place

to hide from the hot prairie sun, or gave up
running and wanted the moon and stars to
find you. Then you might crawl beside one
of the tilted buildings, slump against the wall

with boot tips pointed up and spurs clenching
the hard ground while waiting for the hostile heat
and smelly sage brush, but since my grandparents
died I miss seeing Touchet pass through my mind.