A golden yellow
sky over hazy ridges
jet planes overhead

Heard above the wind
and din of swaying pine trees
jetliner at night

Sudden evening wind
tickles the hairs on my legs.
I can't fall asleep.

And the Earth

Smoke haze bleeds into every canyon
of the watershed like a gaseous poison;
mountain ridges lost in gauzy softness
and gray-blue monotony.

Like a line of poetry played out to its bone
of meaning, or meaning itself, a tarnished sky
at day’s end knows nothing of its beauty.
Dry broken sagging dead trees rotting

got nothin' on me. The dog days growling
in the clouds, the leaves trotting in the wind.
Each weed or weed stalk weaving in air
and the earth a mystery underfoot.

Beaver Creek

Cascading water and spidery ferns
green as pine needles in sunlight,

I look upstream. The canyon climbs
skyward and shadowy where it slopes,

fat boulders pebbled in the dark creek,
the granite shades of black and white.

I plant a thought in the landscape,
and slip naked into the water alone.

Doud's Hill

A dim light shines fiery to the west
of this mountain ridge. My first view
came on a clear Spring day. The distances
looked immense. Mt. Diablo faraway
and rising out of a smoggy haze,
the blue edge of the horizon and the Pacific.

Did the pioneers imagine the Pacific
when they reached this point west?
I see golden poppies and a cloudy haze
in mid-summer. A clear view
of Melones, its fingers pointing away
at farmland in the distances.

That my eyes can see these distances
is amazing. At rest, peaceful, Pacific,
words that sound softly and faraway.
Like the Miwuk or the pioneers moving west
to California. They saw another kind of view,
and traveled different roads? Who sees through the haze

of history? This evening it’s a blue haze
on the mountains and in the empty distant
sky the first stars come into view.
Somewhere over the Pacific
an airliner flying out of the west
looks bright and faraway.

Reluctantly, I will move away
toward home as the heat and the haze
of evening darkens the valley west
of Doud’s Hill. And all across the horizon
the cool air off of the Pacific
and the lights of the cities coming into view,

this panoramic view.
Dusk is enough to take me away
from who I am and know the Pacific
as a place that lies beyond the haze
of our existence, to the distances
that illuminate forever in the west.

I love to look west at the view
where the distances stretch faraway

into the haze above the Pacific.

In the morning sun
a quick flowing narrow creek
fills up the shadows.