Fire Elegy
after Priscilla C.
At the end of August, swallows make their dip and turn
in the descending wind, cross the lake’s
turbid water, where a killer, both drunk and aroused
(the one she met on a dating app),
dumped her on the side of the road, poured kerosene
on her half-naked body, lit it on fire.
And didn’t the white grass shiver on the muggy banks
where a rodeo town was flooded once
to build a dam and where flocks of sheep were shot
and heads of cattle slaughtered …
She was a young mother, this one who dreamed
of opening a beauty shop, of owning
her own home, affording vacations with her daughter;
and didn’t she think he was handsome,
this handyman called Victor, who told her she was pretty,
a real knockout, but what was said
that day that fell into night— was it liquor, coke or grass,
and did she pass out, or was she stabbed
raped, choked, before the flames exploded, sparked
the canyons, split the oaks from pines,
merged with the lightning fire that struck the day before,
tore the landscape upside down, sped
toward ranches, stripped each memory one by one,
as her charred flesh stayed unrecognized
for months and months until an angel pendent buried
in fall’s debris shouted out her name…
Force and Beauty
If a woman hadn’t been out walking her dog,
they might never have found the body
among the miner’s lettuce and jimson weed,
the young nurse may have lain at the base of the creek
invisible to the naked eye for months, years—
unfolded thing becoming a part of the hypothetical West,
her blue-violet flesh cleaving like roots to soil,
disappearing into the unconscious season
when lovers wait for the cleansing rains to pass
like a row of low-lying goldfinches over the reborn lavender....
But nothing is quite transparent in these California hills
where the mist gathers and vanishes,
where one still finds toothed obsidian flakes,
beads and bones of those long ago
who knew the trails exquisitely well,
for here we all walk over burial-grounds without hesitation
or reverence like ravening swine in a slippery mire,
knocking down the prevailing trees
in our wake, mangling the grasses, branding
everything mine as that girl was branded,
the one who had been stabbed twice through the heart,
whose probable killer is still on the loose;
how the blood shudders knowing he looks up
and sees the same paternal heaven, the same cardinal clouds,
that he journeys here and there
with the living sun on his back, someone
like us created in the likeness of God,
defined by his own piercing, his own unbearable shape.
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