MAPS

Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay

*

Apricots—

the downy buttock shape

hard black sculpture of the limbs

on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.

*

These were the staples of the China trade:

sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer

*

The pointillist look of laurels

their dappled pale green body stirs

down valley in the morning wind

Daphne was supple

my wife is tan, blue-rippled

pale in the dark hollows

Kit Carson in California:

It was the eyes of fish

that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes

he watched the ships come in

at Yerba Buena once, found obscene

the intelligence of crabs

their sidelong crawl, gulls

screeching for white meat,

flounders in tubs, startled

*

Musky fall—

slime of a saffron milkcap

the mottled amanita

delicate phallic toxic

*

How old

the fruity warmth of zinfandel

geometries of “rational viticulture”

Plucked from algae sea spray

cold sun and a low rank tide

sea cucumbers

lolling in the crevices of rock

they traded men enough

to carve old Crocker’s railway out of rock

to eat these slugs

bêche-de-mer

*

The night they bombed Hanoi

we had been drinking red pinot

that was winter the walnut tree was bare

and the desert ironwood where waxwings

perched in spring drunk on pyracantha

squalls headwinds days gone

north on the infelicitous Pacific

*

The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs

seas grown bitter

with the salt of continents

*

Jerusalem artichokes

raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio

near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran

Coast range runoff turned salt creek

in the heat and indolence of August

*

That purple in the hills

owl’s clover stiffening the lupine

while the white flowers of the pollinated plant

seep red

the eye owns what is familiar

felt along the flesh

“an amethystine tinge”

*

Chants, recitations:

Olema

Tamalpais Mariposa

Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael

Emigrant Gap

Donner Pass

Of all the laws

that bind us to the past

the names of things are

stubbornest

*

Late summer—

red berries darken the hawthorns

curls of yellow in the laurels

your body and the undulant

sharp edges of the hills

*

Clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs

*

Ishi

in San Francisco, 1911:

it was not the sea he wondered at

that inland man who saw the salmon

die to spawn and fed his dwindling people

from their rage to breed

it was the thousands of white bodies

on the beach

“Hansi saltu…” so many

ghosts

*

The long ripple in the swamp grass

is a skunk

he shuns the day