In this four part collection, the reader is led through a progression of poems, by turns lyrical and reflective. The sections follow the verb forms used by an indigenous California people whose language has long since vanished. Each poem builds on the last to create a cohesive and dynamic collection that, like the seasons the author so often alludes to, eventually comes full-circle, with the promise of something still ahead.
Coming Back from Okanogan
You cross the river east south east and note
how volcanoes and irrigation define the West
and that maybe taking separate cars is not
like anything else: how you have to calculate
ahead and behind and the traffic decides
not just for you but for the one who trails,
with a pickup between, through towns where
they play eight-man football and at least half
of the cheerleaders are virgins but each of their
breasts is its own little animal, and you
pay more attention to every curve, whether
she's keeping pace and when you have to ease
a while and how, when snow begins to spit
as you twist down the Coulee, it asks that you
weigh everything twice: the dusk, the impending
miles, the trucks slow and heavy with hay:
it's not like conversation, or marriage, or even
like making love; it is what it only is:
a late afternoon in mid-October, driving back
from Okanogan through the weathered hush.
Coming Back from Okanogan
You cross the river east south east and note
how volcanoes and irrigation define the West
and that maybe taking separate cars is not
like anything else: how you have to calculate
ahead and behind and the traffic decides
not just for you but for the one who trails,
with a pickup between, through towns where
they play eight-man football and at least half
of the cheerleaders are virgins but each of their
breasts is its own little animal, and you
pay more attention to every curve, whether
she's keeping pace and when you have to ease
a while and how, when snow begins to spit
as you twist down the Coulee, it asks that you
weigh everything twice: the dusk, the impending
miles, the trucks slow and heavy with hay:
it's not like conversation, or marriage, or even
like making love; it is what it only is:
a late afternoon in mid-October, driving back
from Okanogan through the weathered hush.
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