California: poems for the fires

California

I slipped through the hips

of the trees, the trees slipped their way

into me. For hours I sat in the pit

of two branches, containing myself.

Not knowing how to begin

to trace my skin into the scars

of the bark where last night an owl

felt its quiet way inside. Trying

to fit my fingertips into its

feather-prints, the tree’s skin

is dark burnt, an exoskeleton.

I descend into the heart of

its hollow, where last night

a coyote curled in black rain

and gave a swollen, dry howl

which throbbed through the windowpanes.

Here is his bed of ashes.

I hold dust from another city, mingled

with fur and creature and wingtips.

Already I feel breath leaving this husk

to seep into the dirt like a lover

or dust, and last night

through a veil of understanding

or drought, over land and fever

the moon glowed blood.

Dog Song

We on the spine of the land

while the valley slid open

and rustled into place. Giving way

to southern cities, farms encased

in dreamy haze, we howl

like lunatics we throw the moon a wish

for a well or a kiss

for a spell of rain in hell city.

Inside my shoes my feet never

touch the ground but it would taste

bitter. Burnt. The hills rise in a swell

of scarcity and while all this is going on--

the melting, the moving, reality hobbling

on its hinges-- it becomes charred city

bare city, rare. At long last

a coyote answers our throat-sorry prayers.

Whose howl plumes out like last night’s

smoke, which he bears without

being asked. To sing this dog song

is to bend one’s mouth around the bowels

of the earth. And meanwhile

this land crawls into my spine and sits

there, slides into my lidded toes, refusing

to disappear, to wear into another ghost

city. The coyote is on the ridge now

slipping through backdrops of brown

and orange glow, bowing his snout

to the shape of the slopes and the rest

of us watch him kiss the hell

of these howling hills, without remorse.