oaks fill the canyon and line the hilly horizon
in a fringe of black lace. close up, though,
their leaves shine like locusts in the sun,
small and hard and curved. shut wingcases.
the sun sucks the sleek green out of them slowly,
tenderly, until they are bright holes in the sky,
clinging to black branches.
there is no mountain here, beautiful
or otherwise. only the hills, low and fat,
comfortable under an old hole-raddled quilt
of houses and snaking roads.
the name means mountain, though.
beautiful mountain. and so it-- the name--
floats high above the city, untethered, impersonal,
carrying as it does memories of hard-handed
spanish priests who walked this soft soil,
this the inseam of a ragged coastline,
four hundred years ago; and also the smell
of baking flatbread; the sound of acorns
being ground into fine dust. romanticized imagery
out of history. all quite irrelevant to what has since
been made here in this place and on these hills.
(hot asphalt smoothing the uneven contours of the earth.)
and the emptiness of the name is like
the emptiness of the city, the city that
is not quite a live thing, and has no heaviness, no weight.
this city that feels more like the skin of a community
than it does a community: hollowed out and inflated with breath,
stretched taut around silence. not a ball to catch but rather
a balloon to lose, if only someone would cut the string.
a snip, a twang, scissorblades shivering in their grip.
the sudden release of tension singing along the twine.
then, maybe, this pleasant little city,
with its well-lit windows that glitter orange at night
like crushed rock candy, and with you,
its financially stable families, you who chose it
for the quality of the local public school system,
or for the quiet, or for the smokeless air,
and who meet your neighbors at the supermarket,
not out on the leafy, shadowed street:
maybe it and all it holds and its hot hush and you
will go the way of its name,
concrete foundations peeling off dirt
as easily as chewing gum off the underside of a desk,
the architecture and the bones of it only barely
hanging together, only just retaining the topography
of the hills and the hollows, ribbed curves like the inside
of a woman's corset, while it shrinks into
the open blue mouth of the sky and cloud
curls wetly around it and over your upturned faces,
like any other tongue.
do not worry about the raccoons you left behind you,
and the deer who have grown used
to the salty hands of humans, and the pigeons
with their beaks meant for broken bread,
and the bare land and the bruised roots of oak trees
where apartment buildings smiled, once.
they were not ever part of you, not really,
and they will all of them find other things to eat.
