The Evidence is Everywhere

I. The Santa Anas, childlike and profound, blanket me; I see the dust stirring the valley and clouding downtown San Bernardino; I feel the sting of your loss. The black oak leaves, brittle, tumbling, crack under my feet. Is your hand touching the dryness of my lips? You sing: "Don't sit, mountain-still, a coyote skull whistling." I tug at the skin on my wrist, trying to peel off the seam, my stubbornness. On Sunday, I wear my only decent dress, gypsy-green. I hear heels scurry around me, Our priest is a hinged tongue, his verse tucking us in. Why can't I focus on anyone's face? II. The winds fly from a canyon's belly into a peasant blouse. A stampede of leaves and twigs rushes by a patch of grass, scraping across a sidewalk and dragging their nails, fierce and defiant as a local poet's words. From the sides of mountains, waterfalls of dust form, and during my pilgrimage, the fate of lip-stained Styrofoam cups will not unnerve me. Not worried about compasses, I'll go by fences guarding abandoned lots, through desperate patches of grass, yellowing, past one-legged billboards of paper and glue. Resting under the shade of bus stops, I'll recite old tales to ward off the haunted and the debris of family floods piling up. When the voices on an updraft emphatically circle like red-tailed hawks, I'll recall the tail of a comet urging you to wrap yourself in its flames and dissolve. Entranced by a burning equal to yours, I'll walk eighty miles, traveling the routes of my childhood candy wrappers. III. In the moisture of a dirt road I traveled, you are the rain that visited the night before. Does your tongue sense the heat of bodies flying in the Santa Anas? Again, I am lost tracing your face, a dry playa, the eyes of clay, a brown maze of upward glances. Are you a creek bridge, a fallen cedar, lodged between sunbaked boulders inviting me to cross? You are the one taking away my fear of being wheeled down a hallway without doors. IV. With twigs in my hair, I was found somewhere near the national forest. Bystanders pulled back their sniffing dogs while I stood, barefoot and tired. When I predicted earthquakes in China, Peru and Cucamonga, California, I baffled my psychiatric ward. After a nurse removed my handout of The Seasons: Winter, wildlife appeared on the hospital grounds. A mule deer's antlers surfaced in the parking lot, weaving among the staff's cars. A coyote leaped into the patients' garden and howled under a security light as if to say: "I am here. Where are you?" A roadrunner scooted across a lot, losing one of its long tail feathers. All this had the staff checking again if their office windows were latched. In my notebook, I drew a coy face with blurry dots for eyes that peer out of a hollow trunk, struck by lightning, charred by fire, with smoke still rising under your vaulted sky. V. Outside my window, the sky is suddenly draped by a hum, a hummingbird's hunger. Her wings wrinkle the sky. Unlike a chickadee too busy and full of seed chatter, the hummingbird puffs up the air, feeding like a storm, a redness, a sideway rocket past the world's ear. That spark reminds me of you. Thin-rooted, lingering too long, absorbed in window reveries, I'll be released. Here, the soil is moist, sponge-like, storing. Worms surface, digesting their way up. I, too, am ready for the driving winds of another season.