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.