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The girl on the Bullard overpass looks happy to be there, getting soaked in a light rain but waving her hands to the four o'clock freeway traffic in which I'm anything but happy. You might think she's too dumb to come in out of the rain, but rain or shine, it doesn't seem to matter. She's there most every afternoon, as if she does this for a living. Some living, I'd say. Doesn't she ever get bored, or wish someone would stop and say, "Where to?" and her life would change? That's how I'd be, hating the noise, the stink of exhaust, the press of people. I can't imagine what her life is; mine is confused and often fretful. But there's something brave about standing alone in the rain, waving wild semaphores of gladness to impatient passersby too tired or preoccupied to care. Seeing her at her familiar station I suddenly grin like a fool, wave back, and forgive the driver to my right, who is sullen and staring as I pass. I find her in my rear-view mirror, then head for a needed drink and supper. I don't know where she goes, but I hope it's to a place she loves. I hope the rain lets up. I hope she's there tomorrow.

She sees the mountain upside down. With her long hair sweeping the fallen leaves she swings like a pendulum. From the lagoon at sunset a hundred sparrows fly away. Wishing them back she whistles softly. And downward she falls into the sky.

Sitting perfectly upright, contented and pensive, she holds in one hand, loosely, the reins of summer: the green of trees and bushes; the blue of lake water; the red of her jacket and open collar; the brown of her pinned-up hair, and her horse, deep in the yellow of sunflowers. When she stops to rest, summer rests. When she decides to leave, there goes summer over the hill.

In the years I’ve been at this (Lots, not to be precise) You’d think that once or twice At least I would have seen Some anomalies. I mean Some major ones. As in Not feet but little wheels, Or crests like cockatiels’. Where are they keeping the girls With a chrome exterior, Or an extra derriere? Apparently nowhere. Assuming my sample’s valid, The pool is limited To the standard types I’ve tallied; Such variance as there is In the usual congeries Of   physiognomies — And yet enough of   it To be worth the looking at. The walking by, for that, Of   the same girl over and over Would be no cross to bear If   it were that one there.

She came to see the bones whiten in a summer, and one year later a narrow mummy with a dusty skin and flaking scales would break apart in her hand. She wanted to see if sunlight still glinted in those eyes, to know what it lighted from a window on the mallow roots, leaf mold and fallen casques. And to ask if a single tongue, one forked flicker in the dark, had found any heat in death: in the closed space and chill of that burial, what speech, what sign would there be. She who walked in the canyon early, parted the grass and halted upon the living snake, coiled and mottled by a bitter pool, unearthed her jar in another spring, to find the snake spirit gone, only a little green water standing, some dust, or a smell. (1974)

came in an envelope with no return address; she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace. She was standing before a monumental house— on the scale you see in certain English films: urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far too vast for any home. She was not of that place, for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair, and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from an oversize chain around her neck, that looked as if some tall adult had taken it from his, and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe from a world of infinite harm that soon would take him far from her, and leave her standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing without expression into distance, away from the grandeur of that house, its gravel walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket full of flames, but whether fire or flowers with crimson petals shading toward a central gold, was hard to say—though certainly, it burned, and the light within it had nowhere else to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red and burning glow, the only color in the scene. The rest was done in grays, light and shadow as they played along her dress, across her face, and through her midnight hair, lively with bees. At first they seemed just errant bits of shade, until the humming grew too loud to be denied as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed in a country dance between the fields of sun and the black tangle of her hair. Without warning a window on one of the upper floors flew open— wind had caught the casement, a silken length of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees began to stream out from her hair, straight to the single opening in the high facade. Inside, a moment later—the sound of screams. The girl—who had through all of this seemed unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up. She shook her head, her mane of hair freed of its burden of bees, and walked away, out of the picture frame, far beyond the confines of the envelope that brought her image here—here, where the days grow longer now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to fear among us, and the bees swarm.

Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the tassels, the pollen, fertility. Indelible ink is tattooing our lungs. We speak smoke. We exchange our lunacy for reverence. Respect tornados. Windy Woman. Four Winds. We have extended the edge of expectation by merely living. You have tallied compulsion into currency. I am measured by the excitement my lips stir. I am the bin for castoffs and the weary. I wear my veil. I have no children, but you have many. You dream of heaven and they all run up to meet you.

If your bearded friend helps you catch the trout barehanded in the pool of the dream and you carry it in his pail barefoot up the rocky stream to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan; if you snip the dill for the carrots and then swim until your lips are bluer than the lake where will it take you? Not anywhere as pure and primal as these sunstruck days sistered by starstruck nights. Don’t cloud the drowning brightness of your eyes, don’t answer my asking look with anything but the truth, don’t spill the fresh-picked raspberries on the car seat and stain your shirt with indelible blood. Or spill them, darling. How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you, xylem and phloem of your leafy future already starting to spread its shade above us?

They’re all dressed up in carmine floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair festooned with matching ribbons: their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them infuse this sort-of-music as if happiness could actually be each-plays-her-part-and-all-will-take-care-of-itself. Their hearts unscarred under quartz lights beam through the darkness in which we sit to show us why we endured at home the squeaking and squawking and botched notes that now in concert are almost beautiful, almost rendering this heartrending music composed for an archduke who loved it so much he spent his fortune for the musicians who could bring it brilliantly to life.

Out the window of the bar I’m watching a circle of girls stretching and yawning across the street. It’s late January and 74 degrees. They love the heat because they are a moist heat. Heat loves heat and today is a tease for what comes with spring around here when the glorious birds funnel back up from Mexico. The girls don’t care about birds because they are birds. I recall in high school a half dozen cheerleaders resting on a wrestling mat in short shorts in the gym, me beside them with a silly groin ache. What were they? Living, lovely, warm meat as we all are reaching out of our bodies for someone else.