Epistle 2

Friend,

I realized it today, and I think you, more than anyone, will understand. From the ship, rather than being surrounded by water like I am on land, I am surrounded by land like it is water-- finally perceived as a whole, moving in swells, developing events of pine and mist. It was particular pines and mist that startled me with the realization which is the impetus for this letter.

I have been too long without the acceptance of the forest. Acceptance: it strikes you, perhaps, as a peculiar word to use. Let me explain. The forest is a whole thing, tall, taller than a man, and deep, deeper than a mind. It is a smell and a sight, a sound, a dressing for mangled skin, the flavor of irons in the earth. It being infinitely vast in its Zeno's paradox of scale, the only relationship a man can have with it is to be accepted into it, like sugar into tea. Such a relationship does not make floral sugar but sweet tea.

Something about being absorbed into the forest is necessary, restorative, vital. My room in the village afforded me easy access to the shelter of trees and the nutritive aroma of the soil. It is not so where I live now. I am sick for the forest. I am desperate to be small and in awe. I am brittle without the opportunity to banish my ego and be the air in the lungs of the trees, inhaled and absorbed by them, put to good use, and made indistinguishable from the mist.

The city, too, is beautiful, but it falls apart when you touch it. When I touch the earth, I am the thing falling apart. And falling apart is such a comfort.

Your Friend,

Epistle 3

Play of light on the kitchen table
stitches the kitchen table to another fabric of time,
which occurs simultaneously,

such kitchen table I am sitting at with you
more handling cold lingerings from breakfast than eating.

I stare out the window at the sea
and am all too eager to reassure you
when you ask me what's wrong

that nothing is wrong, love,

that I am wondering what life is like at a kitchen table
without you there

that I think it must also be inescapably wonderful

because this kitchen table exists somewhere
connected to all other tables without you

by the tidal light which plays upon it.

Point Loma

If once the palms were whole
what beast clawed them to ribbons?

If waves are made of wellings up
inevitably, thus, they break.

Life is a topography of questions
and statements.

With my eyes closed and my lungs open
I breathe them in,

and read them back,
and ask, and state, and ask--

Presidio

Oleander and eucalyptus.
Fundamentally, these.
The scent in the air is not oleander and eucalyptus.
The air is oleander and eucalyptus
as the sun exists only in the twirl of their leaves
--such shape of leaves I had forgotten--
as the territory is demarcated by their silhouettes
as I etch our story in the shallow mulch
soon to forget, soon to change.

West of the

Pizza place, we're retouched in gold.
Something desperate it is that you hold wide in you hands
as you
explain
as always.
Maybe I had something to say to you then.
That moment's gone missing.
Pizza place, we're retouched in gold.
Its accolades in want of mantles,
walls, even.
Its accolades hanging otherwise
poltergeistically
in the chill that worries my spine.

Unmouthable Lake

Where we are equals
is a lake with
unmouthable
words for a name.

And crowned in firs.

Your greens are long
drawn through the water
staining ribbons
around my skin.

But I

Oh, I
am fast in the water
and this is why
we're equals here.

If I cannot touch you,

I can be breathed in
by the gills
also breathing in you

so that we are one song

sung
by the unmouthable lake,
each of us mere notes
in its melody

safely just parts of

a music happening
on the skin
and in the spine,
felt, never heard.

California

California, the sun plucks the palm fronds

making honey sweet honey colored
music and light you see, California
is a melange of the senses dressed
in warmth. Warmth, effusive
from which I might be smelted.
California, damp cool mornings
ease you into afternoons measured
in miles, not in hours, time is a unit
between the changes of the tide.

Somewhere in the reaching haze of California's morning,
hand in hand with it, somewhere in the reaching haze, my heart,
from which it might be smelted, my heart, hand
in hand with it, the bed is deep and wide--

deep and wide--

and rolling with blankets, a bookcase,
books overflowing onto the floor
tied up in the curtain strings swirled
in ambers, with bees and poppies,
sand and bare legs, wind in my long hair,
tangled shadow of eucalyptus, avocado,
hills and hills, cliffs and sprays,

safety that predates danger, safety without questioning,
eternal breakfast tables with halves of limes,
stale tortillas, something sweet in tin foil, picked at
at hours throughout the night, where we sit
sat, sit, are sitting now, then, now and then, and always are
sitting, smiles cooled with mist, clocks calmed
by the touch of the sun, and all I want for breakfast
is the salt of the sea, and the day before me,
like never before, is delicious.
California breeze possesses my limbs,
graceful, tan, strong
all that is meaningful about my body
hangs in the white break of wave and
wave and wave and wave and wave
and I am as much an occurrence
as I am a thing beheld in eyes
--I linger in the lilt of the sand--
as much as California haunts my bedroom
I haunt California's palm song,
mute in my mind, my heart has a voice there.

When I am absorbed into my walls at night
and my bed no longer supports but overtakes me,
when clanging words knock against my ears
I close my eyes and in my body feel, sweet
as jasmine on the briny air, the endless
flaxen totality of

this

smile between us.

My Mother's Hands

My mother's hands touch my mother's wrinkles in my mother's face.

In my family, the matriarchal lineage is codified in tears.

It is her tired, curtained cheeks that rose through my rebellions-
like a son starts to bald-
which, six years in exile, returned me to a sense of family.

My hands burn under dishwater.
I sleep in late, now, too; I understand.

My mother's hands pick up each cucumber on display,
weighing them against each other, looking for the smallest one.

In California, a cucumber is sixty nine cents by the each.
These are two ninety eight by the pound.

And cream cheese,
and sprouts, for cream cheese cucumber sprout sandwiches

that we used to have,
the white bread sticking to the roofs of our mouths.

I cannot find sprouts.
The bread is wrong, I cry.
My mother's hands, lobster-red and lobster-hard,
put together a sandwich for me
tonight
they

transcend the West coast,
pray

to an icon through which I might connect to what it was I came from,
and still

wipe cheeks before the tears can further erode
our history in my face.