Somewhere past
La Panza
roadrunner runs across the
road
and freezes
with wings half-outstretched
(a gesture shared with the
mockingbirds outside my window,
flushing up bugs across the
street and waging endless running battles
with the noisy robins
a perpetual avian gang war
raging in
this new old Nashville neighborhood)
perhaps to stun some torpid reptile
into fatal ectothermic hesitation,
or maybe as a futile bluff against the car,
this dead machine so brutally indifferent to
the subtle body languages of animals,
no way to tell
the great ground cuckoo
(whose >< -shaped
zygodactyl footprints
point forward and backward likea pair of antithetical logical operatorslocked in mutual nullification ormaybe reflected angles diverging toward infinite horizons
past and future)
is already disappearing in the
rearview as I silently name each bird
we pass as we wind down the
entirety of
highway 58
red-tail, turkey condor, scrub jay, towhee, red-tail, quail
from my natal grounds about
the foggy upper reaches of the
Salinas
and out across the sodic wastes
and proto-solar scars of the
Carrizo
red-tail, kestrel, meadowlark
and over the gentle
earthly undulations of the
San Andreas
magpie, meadowlark, goldfinch, red-tail
and down the surprisingly
short sharp scarp of the
Temblors
scrub jay, acorn woodpecker, crow, red-tail
and into the mostly motionless
pumpjack forests
of the McKittrick oil patch
starling, blackbird, rock doves
and out onto the not quite
completely-drained marshes
along the southern shore of
old gone
Tulare Lake
littered with cotton and plastic
and great piles of Russian thistle
stacked against the barbed-wire
egrets, harrier, gulls, starlings, blackbirds
through gritty
Bakersfield
fast food and cheap fuel
and up, way up,
past the great cursive loop
that carries trains over the
Tehachapis
where my good old gone dog
Moose first puppy-frollicked
in the snow
and Clyde now
in the back is
nervous going
up and over
for the first time ever
(here where Laura Cunningham
says imperial woodpeckers and thick-billed parrots
once, maybe, flew!)
and past the giant cement factory of
Monolith
turkey condors, ravens, kestrel, red-tail
and down, down, down
between the giant white
turbines slicing deadly huge
scythe-arcs through the sky
and the weird experimental
egg-beatery ones that must
have been a failure since
I never see them in any
other windfarm
and into clear
and, even on this January day,
somehow blistering
Mojave
past the glittering jet junkyard
where the great
old yuccas have
replaced the oaks and pines
and junipers of the morning,
grackles on the move
reserves for the vanguard
wave pushing north toward
Oregon already,
and then past
Boron
where great sweating teams eighteen mules
and two horses
dragged minerals out of the deserts
and into the factories and wash basins
of the world
and now I have either forgotten my game
or the birds are hiding
in the hard, bright shadows
of the late afternoon desert in winter
and now a bathroom break
in Barstow
and then onto the flat
black ribbon of interstate
that will carry us to Arizona
with a choking radiator
into snowy Flagstaff,
Gallup, Alburquerque,
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas,
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky
and finally
down into Tennessee
right into this house
and this chair.
But sitting here I still think about
that fat, spice-colored bird
–the one who once walked in through the open
kitchen door, picking up errant quinoa
from the floor,
and I looked up from this computer,
2000 miles away,
and I said, "hey! what are YOU doing in here?"
–way back in California.
