And the Tectonic Plates of California—
By Leonore Wilson
…like packable documents did they portend lightning
or the sag ponds the linear troughs
did the compromised oaks in their full-drought state
the blood-brother hills off-kilter hawks
the boys who drowned in the Suisun canal
the coyote strung up with tongue cut out…
Did the young Knoxville widow with eroded face
the foreman from Esparto with a hook for a hand
the three-legged calf born -out-of season
or the rat or the mouse in the field half-eaten…
Are premonitions important are gods clairvoyant
who thought California would fold up in fire
Did the monarchs know our stripped-dressed Cassandras
or the Sierra Nevada in cold Delphic silence…
What West-coast heat defied explanation
what smoke in wet-nostrils and funeral ashes…
Once poems were a compote of form and scent
and textbooks consumed while children slept
once crimson salamanders at the slip-base of summer
a Franciscan farmhouse a wooden garden behind…
Now thistles blight trails the color of tallow
mottled doves shunt downward in bone-dry bouldery
now portals of earth thrown open by lightning
now the queen honeybee abandons her throne…
Leonore Wilson is a college English and creative writing teacher from Northern California. She is on the MFA Board at St Mary’s College of California. Her poetry books are Western Solstice (Hireath Press) and Tremendum, Augustum (Kelsey Press). Leonore’s work has been in The Iowa Review, Third Coast, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Upstreet, Madison Review, Laurel Review, Pif, etc. Her historic cattle ranch and family home in Napa Valley were recently destroyed in the LNU fire.
