and its cry of Maayg! Maayg! filling the breast and waist
of me, with sound, a kind of rocking,
as my face also feels the sun’s new burnish.
This is happiness, striding down this road, a single car every once
or twice an hour, as I walk and lean toward the mountain I see into
the distance, the distance itself filling with grace
of new green sage, the darker pine.
Yes, this compass of me, who loves it, it being my
sight-sigh, the brash grasses, pitch and timber of quiet,
where I am fragile, forgetting the lists, the to do’s and,
where I belong.
I felt so Here, how the sky opened my ribs,
pressed against me, and it seemed I walked through,
as if I were treading to somewhere new, though I’d
walked here so many times. Mine, I would think.
But the eye of history is always open. And its dense
gravity of land, and now this sickness — when
a stranger, his own voice hawk-like, drives
his beaten truck alongside me, leans out his window,
“Foreigner!” he shouts. “Get out! I
live here! You
bring disease. Get out,
You, You!”