The silver-lit trail takes us to a lone oak, before
the bend, with a distant view of the Monterey hills.
Plants re-seed the landscape where humans would redden
winter’s myth of dormancy. It’s the rooms we can’t see,
extra space for nut-hiders, for scrub jays, for kinglets
who smudge red on their forehead. I’m here with my husband,
who believes in what we cannot see, whose
meditation is pure and empty. Around the bend, hidden from view,
pelicans, terns, whimbrels, a pool of cinnamon teals.
Let’s stop here, I say. I learned to sip out a canteen
on long Sierra Club trips, learned to pack a car
and set up a tent watching my father. My mother taught me
seven syllable words. Later, the words disappeared
into a tea cup with two hands. Here, the base of the oak
disappears into the ground—branches root to the sky, like the brain
where metronome ideas form. A couple passes, discussing
the question of wounds and how to treat them, when she points
to her forearm. A bloody patch. Like pickleweed, she says,
meaning the scaley succulent, like a sea creature, green
fingers turning red. A small wind has started. I zip my down jacket
and re-adjust the crocheted scarf mended yesterday. Years ago
when I’d moved back home, my mother made it clear
this was not for long while my father found
a therapist in the city. Since his passing, I’ve forgotten
how he took care of things before they emptied.
Today, pausing for ants pooling near the log, it’s enough
how lichen masses against everything, where bark has been
stripped, wood eaten in patterns.
—
Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, active with the Women’s Poetry Salon. She curates Ekphrastic Writers and is a reader for Common Ground Review. Current publications: Pirene’s Fountain, Lily Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Taos Journal of Poetry. She is a Cider Press Review Book Award finalist, Pushcart Prize nominee, and received an Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition. Find her at: https://www.laurelbenjamin.com
