Los Osos

Through photographs, I was almost

there! Wading among the sumac

of my own baby's cradle,

where all the children grow up singing

oh my sweet calamine,

cleaning tar from feet with cooking oil,

trying to negotiate with a faceless wind.

And solitude is a long, indestructible

bone, a dry finger,

stroking madrone,

feeling the bruise of etched initials:

she was here,

he was here, they were there,

Los Osos.

Solitude: it's a heavy sound

on the tongue, has weight

but contains sun: 

see it there: sun. 

There used to be ghosts hunkered down in the dunes.

There used to be European diseases.

There used to be a town called La Panza,

perched on waves of quartz, and

little girls sleeping there

dreamt of bears.

Sometimes I worry

my own heart might become a ghost town.

I rejoice in gentle artifacts still mobile,

bouyant, bristling,

you're so very alive, you there,

phenomenon. 

Both literally and in some larger sense

a bird. 

And didja know, didja:

ten years old in Los Osos,

I walked out in my nightie,

entered a windstorm.

It knocked me over like a sapling,

like a cruel love or hard time-

the crouching oaks all rattled

like diamondbacks,

and somewhere all the diamondbacks were

sleeping, I guess,

beneath rocks, on the waves of quartz,

dreaming of bears.

Time wound sideways through

the sand. Indefatiguable. Oh boy. 

I've heard that some oaks became gunpowder.

I don't know where the bears went,

but there are still bear-crossing signs on the highway.

And the oak moth is still a glutton,

and I am too,

still trying to capture the bounty of

the season,

still almost attempting to apply taxonomy

like all the others passing, mapping,

she was here, he was here,

they were there,

Los Osos