The jay’s plume has no blue in it.
A trick of light; that’s all it is.
The light refracts, the blue distills
from white, as if these canyon walls
could take the sun on their limestone
and cast it out to show the blue
old sea in which those shells were born.
Cast wide that net. Drag the bottom.
Today, in deep, I hold my breath
against the dessicated air
in need of damp.

Remember when
I let her pass, closing my eyes
and listening to the shallow surf
along San Pablo Bay? I knew.
I knew the moment when it came,
the end, the threshhold, and she turned
and vanished in the eucalypts.
I smelled the miner’s lettuce, rinsed
in a thousand winter tears; the wind
from off the Gate across the Bay
pulled a dozen more from me.

This wind comes up the canyon dry,
each ounce of wet scraped out of it,
range after range of desert peaks
between us and the nearest sea.
This scrub jay’s yerba santa perch
incongruous, and the chill breeze
behind me, with the tang of some
old and coniferous coast,
and that Bay wind four years ago
dropped tears on my pants legs.

1. 
   bev 2011 04 11 at 9:30:58 am

   Beautiful. 
   Homesick.  A familiar feeling.
   No way to return though,
   so also feeling a little homeless.