I find myself waiting for yesterday's crazed hills
To fall through me again. Some slip away, of
course (nothing's perfect), except those hundreds
Of abandoned houses we passed, roofless
Mortuaries of sun and rain, now no one's
Dying in empty rooms of weeds, heavenly
Views from windows never marveled at.
I imagine their builders sleep now as birds
In fields, or on hillsides as boulders,
Because so much labor amounts to nothing,
Come January's weeks of rain, come
This heart-breaking green again, only
Love could approve such mouths of flame.
Still I wait (their word for hope)
For those hills to fall further inside me, those
sudden ascensions, turnings, those lurching gaps --
There a far smile of ocean glimpsed, here
A mammoth semi perched as we creep past
A cliff's edge, needing just a push.
Rounding a lupine-flooded rise
A burro in the bed of a pick-up, two
Brown sparrows asleep on his back,
The soul of a nation, you sighed,
Bumping nonchalantly into town.
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