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I I watch for morning
from the yellow pine belt, 2000 feet above the death mask of the valley,
three hours by car from the sea that’s on its way to take me back.
The moon sets in a notch between two mesas, melting to cellophane when thick,
low fog glides in underneath, blithely borrowing the light to bounce fill
Morgan Canyon in the peach of orchards and chestnut mares gathered from
the lower slope and carried up the hill. Chintz cloaked with a lantern swinging,
the hermit comes to call.Next
II As fog takes Pennyroyal Lane
it scissorkicks the ridge; for a startled moment I am shoreline beneath
unstable mass. I once watched a wave take down my children and hold them;
the oldest returned, then the girls, but I saw the head of my youngest crown
without time to breathe before the sneaker wave took him down again and
cleared the beach.Next
III Eye-level with invisibility,
I fight for teal in the bull pine, hot lava in the wheelbarrow propped upright
against the tree, the white of deck chairs in defense of dimension and the
labors of handtinting a photograph. As last barrier, I name the shape of
chartreuse squiggle fish passing across my eyelid. Losing the saturated
colors I gain the equivalences of sea and snow. With all spectacles withdrawn,
the worlds are seamless, eyes open or closed.Next
IV It takes no effort to deny
the world I’m taxed for. Those driving by the white line on the highway
will not risk my hill. My land is a planet and I can climb about it in a
blank stare moving rocks, one by one, all morning building a canal. Fog
is not a veil of light but an opening through the sprangled detail.Next
V Fishing for salmon early
in the morning fog outside the Golden Gate, we motored slowly on radar.
The fish weren’t biting and the swells were up, so I lay cocooned in
down jackets and wool blankets. There’s a photo of me nauseous, pekid
and sleepy. Bob took it to his shop and the guys had a good laugh at his
luck, but I had learned to keep an eye on the horizon, a hand around a rock,
or a word from the place you want to return to.Next
VI Even grasses want to shirk
their convalescence on the taste of two days’ rain. Ripening beneath
the old growth that glistens like a scythe, a season begins less with profusion
than persistence. I think of the word ingrained. When rye is triggered,
it must draw a blade and claim a territory. I think of an infant at labor,
forcing an entrance-in-exile but not laughing for months.Next
VII I remember wild oats sown
in Syria, women planting corn in the loam of Illinois, the tapping of fertility
and the forming of an idea to settle down, around a perpetual source. Someone
limited the crops for ease upon the mother, someone understood the need
of being fallow. I have camped in the fields of shepherds, feeding children
chickens raised by Kurds. I have detasseled corn and kept the seed. Of all
I’ve done, the hardest was to settle and believe.Next
VIII I hired two women to clean
my house. Frankie, the taller, cleaned only windows, but Ethel even washed
my clothes. On her day off, she drove back to return one hundred dollars
I had left inside my jeans. I was crying. I took the money but didn’t
realize who she was. All I know, she said, is what I know. There’s
nothing to lose in asking for love. Some years later I remembered that when
my mother was crying and lost, my great grandmother Ethel sent one hundred
dollars. I sat with my great grandfather Frank in the garden. What don’t
I know, I asked. I give up. I’m missing a basic idea. Love the life
you live, he said. It’s not vice versa. Next
IX Standing in the grain
on the granite, I feel timed to the pause between cycles of light. The shimmery
vapors recede; the sun intrudes with surges. I am the moon rising unseen.
Romantics caked with old sperm like salt pan, we bear no signals, we risk
no baptists from exhausted loins. We poured blood into the earth and saved
the wine to celebrate deserved release from labors. I’m admiring the
rocks I’ve moved from place to place. I am ready for either drought
or rain.Next
X When the fog thins,
shadows are already larger than their source. My rocks have become a monument
of distance, highwater mark upon the ridge of solitude, work done. Then
evening elegantly wraps around bare day. A planet sparkles and base ten
reappears precisely located long ago and far away. And I’m here, still
here, ageless, formless, fallow testimony trying to picture whole one design.
One basket stitch by stitch or one bridge or one cobblestoned irrigation
canal. One woman as finished construction. Even one day in one life, mine.
©Originally published as "Fog in Ten Movements", Excused
Absences, 1994, California State University, Fresno.
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