North of Santa Monica

It’s midnight in a drizzling fog on Sunset Avenue and we are walking through the scent of orange blossoms and past a white camellia blown down or flung by someone onto rainblack asphalt waiting for the gray Mercedes sedan to run over and smash its petals and leave us walking in the smell of Diesel exhaust with orange-blossom bouquet. Where the next blue morning and the gray Pacific meet as the Palisades fall away two sparrowhawks are beating their tapered wings in place, watching for jay or chewink to stray too far from their thorny scrub to get back— and the female suddenly towers, her wings half-close and she stoops like a dropping dagger, but down the steep slope she rockets past them and turns again into updraft to the clifftops to hover— as the jay peers out through thorns, and the lines of white surf whisper in.