The sea was a weather vane,
the chop marching south.
Hundreds of gulls were arrayed,
like a corps de ballet.
They leapfrogged their compatriots,
and resumed their spacing,
always at a respectful distance
from each other and from us.
When there was no more space to land
they lifted off, became
a flock of white caps
ministering to the wind.

In the last of three arroyos
was our destination: a fossil
bed, allegedly world-renowned.
And it might very well
have been all there,
locked in conglomerate,
like the floor at Las Ventanas.

There was next to nothing to take home:
a few shells, a few
cuts from sharp rocks.
The wind picked up
and stirred the dust of the dry riverbed.

A red mule and a gray colt, grazing,
were determined to be afraid of us,
they kept running ahead on the trail —
we could have cared less.

Magnificent Frigate birds
still above the cliffs
as if on wires — Did you say

They could be anything, if
you do not know what they are?

As we neared the car
the gulls, fewer in number, unmoving,
fearless or merely tired;
two decapitated blue fin
— they were not there before —
their heads shared a diadem of ants;
a green pickup with Oregon plates,
the tags long expired;
and young mulatto in fatigues
cradling an M-16
walked towards an idling truck.

Did he have a shit-eating grin?
Or a smile?
                                   Now I can’t be sure.

At home in this rustic valley: swifts
and bees, trilliums and buddleia.
Mud daubers bob for shady corners,
in crumbling walls, to build their homes in.
Liberties and Allemandes
pucker up in the shade of home trees.
On the cold shoulders of extinct volcanos
glaciers grind their cornerstones
to dust which stains chill rivulets,
that spring from glacier’s lips,
ecru. Soon gorgeous whitewater
they empty into Trask and Yazoo,
Vistula and Amazon. Undiluted Prussian to
the almost transparent of Murakami Ryu;
to the blues of the Yamuna at Prayag,
where brown Ganges meets the Saraswati.
As a transportation bureaucracy
they haul numberless crushed stones;
they support barges, liners and water skis;
and reflect a thing almost no one else reflects on:
the filthy undersides of bridges.
When they rise to predicted flood states,
they ferry in great excess of their gross tonnage.
Naked, mud-colored and ravenous,
they might denude a few homes, a village.
All share one fate and drain — most go quietly —
into open ocean. It absorbs them all,
even the eminence grise, like a suppository.

2.

I love all places I am from
but I am nowhere now.
Are these words words I put into your mouth,
or are they my own? Here, even
the sirens that rock the siestas are alien.
From the dock I watch — are they terns? —
fish in seas of tourmaline and jetsam.
Fry that school between the pilings
flash like change on baize,
and, after dark, on the balcony, it’s easier to pretend
since waves sound more or less the same
the world over: like traffic. Your name
is always on the tip of my tongue
between parentheses of breathing out and breathing in.
Since we must tend to the forsaken,
must strive to enlighten all sentient beings,
must never ridicule what others hold sacred,
I accept the call to serve,
which is so much less arduous than loving.
We are in agreement about this,
but how to know whether suffering
is different in kind or by degree?
Was it a golden age when all combat was hand to hand?
Have you seen them, Gaul and Trojan, Pict and
Tutsi?
Gone down on one knee
with a neat part from a machete?
The bull we must take by the horns
has a human body.

3.

The blue hour: laurels across the yard
look like decor in an aquarium;
the Empress tree displays its violet blossoms;
first headlights case the street
as my Olympia unfolds her tattooed wings,
licks and flashes her kittenish teeth,
the pearly gates of my oasis.
Parmaginino would give her neck
to any nymph, every Magdelene;
Correggio has caught her
better than the paparazzi
in deep canoodle, in flagrante
with Zeus’s avid cloud —
the tongues of lightning have
gone upriver, into the Jaws of Life,
(so much is hidden, and so tastefully) —
God forbid that it would be any other way.
With a beehive against my ear
I hear the calvary massing in the pines
the hooves spark on erratics —
or are those Roman candles tracers? —
remains from the reign of her blue eyes.
What waits in that milky Greenland amber
but carbon dioxide and diatoms?
The lighted sign at the Baptist church announces
“How to Protect Your Family From Porn.”
I wait to hear you blink
before I return the phone to its cradle.

The flame burns guileless blue
under the battered kettle.
When the wind blows just so
there’s a whiff of french fry oil
from the shack by the ferry dock
or maybe, just maybe,
of biodiesel. After dark
count the cars as they disembark,
bouncing over the rumble strip.

Foam on breakers mark
what could be the first appearance
of feathers where, for millennia,
there were only scales.
A tanker eases through the level’s eye,
a target in an elaborate shooting gallery.
Mist the color of skim milk
hides the off-shore terminus.

In the creamery your goats’ produce
sweetens into sustenance.
Wrapped in grape leaves
or daubed with ash, like sadhus.
Beyond the neighbors’ split rail fence,
as if nursing a grudge,
the timeless bawling of ruminants.
Docile as old wives’ tales,
they kneel before the rain.

Its headwaters in the library,
the eponymous creek,
is stitched like a homily
into the back pasture.
Creatures come to it as they
come to your open hand.
I read to the them from your rocker,
their oblong eyes unseeing.

While the sun set its signet
on your wax-pale shoulders,
swallows picked
the cottonwood cotton.
Your least favorites, the crows
are gathering into hoards.
Is their dawn harangue
faintly apocalyptic?

The goats are dripping
in their winter coats
under dripping eaves,
a cornucopia
in their curled horns,
their teats swollen:
this land is yours.

A pulchritude
holds a lute
of unfired clay;
wavering gouges
indicate strings.

From a marble paddock
bronze Chiron preaches
to the aloes, to the
venerable root-bound jade.

On the screen saver
three favorite Hentai
stills of violation.

On the wall
the second wife
on her first wedding day;
the first mother-in-law

Reading Pooh
to her first grandson.
Namesakes no one met,

Bearded by custom,
shrunken by daguerreotype.
Ravel with a cigarette.

A nude that could be his Pavane
bends over a basin
in a cast-iron stand.

Color is not absent
in the temperate light
of her black-and-white
world; water glitters

In her cupped hand
like a handful
of crushed pearls;

But is water,
no more and no less.
Nearby a black dog

Is curled at the foot
Of the heaviest member
of the heavenly host.

And a cherub rests
on the millstone
about our necks,

that last impediment
to our freedom to
asphyxiate.

From a marble paddock
bronze Chiron preaches
to the aloes, to the
venerable root-bound jade.

On the screen saver
three favorite Hentai
stills of violation.

On the wall
the second wife
on her first wedding day;
the first mother-in-law

Reading Pooh
to her first grandson.
Namesakes no one met,

Bearded by custom,
shrunken by daguerreotype.
Ravel with a cigarette.

A nude that could be his Pavane
bends over a basin
in a cast-iron stand.

Color is not absent
in the temperate light
of her black-and-white
world; water glitters

In her cupped hand
like a handful
of crushed pearls;

But is water,
no more and no less.
Nearby a black dog

Is curled at the foot
Of the heaviest member
of the heavenly host.

And a cherub rests
on the millstone
about our necks,

that last impediment
to our freedom to
asphyxiate.