Crocker Museum, Sacramento, 2004

There’s a confluence

among things—

the shoulders of a pepper,

the buttocks

of a pear, cruciferous

vegetables

and riverine channels

of shadow

in a dune’s dry tributaries;

the flare

of light on an upper lip’s

down,

the trunk of a cypress, the surf

off Point Lobos,

the riffles of a dead

pelican’s feathers

and the famous hawk profile of

the California poet.

They looked like callas or tulips
you could gather with a fist

or white amaryllis
you could snip from their shimmering
place in the world

you could slip from their stems
with sharp scissors

but they were toiling
the salt under-veins, tunneling
the weedy caverns

with yellow pickaxes
hunting up
a shining nugget
of flesh.

I thought of Van Gogh again:
"Making progress is like miner’s work."

The birds that glowed like headlamps
were transformed by those alchemical
words, into painters and poets.

That same night
I woke nauseous, in a sweat,
with all the old worries.

I saw the comb jellies gleaming, beached
ink and crystal, in the sea wind’s
cold fire, and

the egrets waiting, wading,
waiting; their sickle necks muscling
under the quartz

feathers, the beaks harpooning,
working the weed-wrack
and foam-lip—

juggling up a little flash, a hopeless
flip and urgent splash
of writhing

through the sand-grit
and surf-crack. Was there
some calligrapher hiding

in the cloudshift that wrestled
and boiled in over them—
some itchy finger

or twitchy nib that sketched them in,
that outlined them all over
with restless mercury?