I. Crossing San Andreas

Who feels the earth an indifferent mass
Stranger to the pains of bones and eyes
Will find here that with each leg on
Limbs so slow the trees walk back and forth
The thread from that sharp spool run out
For miles wrapped in time's body centuries deep:
Body of bodies, here in the wind.

Eyes that earned their keep by saying
How the jaguar waits, how the tinamou runs,
How a woman's glance is moved by love
Cannot help but see a different hand
In these hills, an older gentler genius
Walking the fragment of a foundered kingdom
Held but not subsumed, not comprehended
Symbol, waiting to be completed.

The birds maintain that nothing is changed
Ruffle their old, old, brown feathers
Disputing ownership, sovereignty, and love
But follow the creeping, skipping gnomon
North, into the colder air, until redwoods
Send up their masts, their ship-rigged cathedrals
And love by then, where it must, has changed them.