My Favorite California

In and out of the body you were an animal 

gathering fog in the trails you left, tracing 

the edges of red flowers, breath practice. 

In the afternoon hair makes the cleanest hush, 

grass. Counting ladybugs, burning my skin, drawing 

my finger out into the world as an instrument, teacher. 

At a sudden migratory V, the mountains rush to each other 

in confidence, vault the wind up into a wall. 

All we could do was yell 

and get our voice sent straight back. 

We watched girl hikers do the same, 

the yelling, the hollering, the being barbarian. 

Fog leveling over, rushing down the hillside 

leaving us, leaving us,

the unbelievable barges revealed 

and curtained again. You place the landscape with language. I mimic

series of mirrors. We collect illegal flowers, shimmer and break, 

run through the field like a cold lace. 

Transparency

Tilt my head back. 

Where does the sky begin?

In the late sun, a crow sweeps 

blue veils. It lifts.

A crow can, sometimes, 

be silver. I stay until 

its turns become obscured 

by the glinting brick of dormitories.

Another time:

Camera hung from her neck, 

my mother calls me 

out to the yard. Her perfect 

fingers open a jewelry box. 

My hair drapes a shelter 

for inspection.

The wet, pink body. 

A beak. A suggestion 

of feathers. The motionless 

boomerang of a wing. 

She asks me to hold it. 

Offers a strip of ribbon, 

for art or maybe for distance, or both, 

lays the dead bird 

in the silk center 

of my palms. 

I ask 

my mother for this 

photograph, she says, 

I treasure it of course. 

and psychologically 

I’ve been death conscious 

from the outset. 

I come to a crosswalk. 

Across the street, 

the hunched shape 

of a man emerges 

from a door, holding 

a plastic sack like the scruff 

of a child. Reaches into the bag. 

The hand surfaces 

a half-closed fist 

and flickers gold seeds 

over the grass. 

Entering this world, 

his white feet oscillate 

through the daffodils, 

sets their trumpets to the task 

of rhythm-keeping.

In the morning, 

I crawl out of a dream: birds 

descending on the flowers 

in a litany of black, anxious smudges,

the serrated call of a crow 

edging through rain. Somewhere, 

my mother saying the word, 

Transparency. 

And then the entire early landscape

ruptured by light, shadowless 

deer closing down 

on spring’s yellow face.