Stegner's Last Towhee

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.