Wandering Underlands

You are something of a trickster:
Now I see you, now I don't.

Now we see you, now we don't.
Now I see you in the vetch-mound's

Fluted violet and white-lipped whisper.
I see you in the ridiculous light from sour flower blossoms below

Valley oaks aching for another spring rain
(But I do not see you walking to me in the rain—strange).

Good God, I have no one
Thing I can ask for. I worry I am being tasked

With a legacy of lack. Like a good teacher, you already know;
I don't have to rasp out requests or quip quotations

To you, the champ and the cantor
Of syntax, for you are with words

As much as in time, and you insist on a structure.
You, bird in the morning, wake me at my window;

You, monster of my nightmares I can't find
But always fear. I remember talking to darkness

When you appeared not to my sight
But to my ears: a honey-heavy comb I was compelled

To create as my candles burned out, spelling
Disaster for my eyes I couldn't use anymore,

Disaster for my garrulous tongue plucked from
Me, my misspoken poems leaving sores in my mouth.

I couldn't see or speak, but I could hear and sing,
And you've tricked me again: now I have you, now I don't.

When you master a syntax, you are with words
In ways you cannot undo. And now I see you.

I do and I do not.
You are here. You are gone.

A portion of the American River watershed that has tilted out of the tumult of the Sierra to slow and settle and sink into the Central Valley before mud-gushing into the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta on the way to the brackish Bay Estuary and its Golden Gate to the quite unpeaceful Pacific. As photographed by aeroplane then printed sometime in the 20th century and then photographed by me, Andrew May, sometime in the 21st on a visit to the Folsom Powerhouse State Park.