Delta Breeze

To conclude National Poetry Month, I feel blessed to share with you this poem. I wrote it many years ago, a love letter to my home town, and I was elated when it was chosen for an anthology put out by our city’s first official poet laureates, Dennis Schmitz and Viola Weinberg. It was 2001, post 9/11, and I was having a terrible year in my classroom. When my poem was accepted, I was so grateful. The school district was making teaching too hard, but at least I was still a poet. I could still write.

Tonight you sit on the front steps
facing south
beckoning me 
with your dry lips
your moist fingers.
I am already here
but I am still 
and you do not recognize me.
I press against your skin,
a sweaty companion:
I am hot and heavy handed;
you crave a lighter touch.
Yet I fill your nose and mouth
slip into your lungs 
course through your veins.
I drift in.
I drift out.
I am conscious
of everything
and nothing.


You imagine me with human emotions:
anger or tenderness. 
I have no desire, jealousy, passion.
But I know joy.
I whisper to the poplars
as I braid their leafy hair 
in the meadow.
I fill the bones of the raptor,
glide above 
the sequoia and pine,
dive into a red
and brown canyon.
I mate with the river,
gurgling
through the gills 
of salmon and trout.

You give me many names:
zephyr, tempest, squall.
I roll over your tongue
as you call me.
In August 
I am a god in this valley.
At 9 PM
I stretch my heavy 
muscles and rise
creating space 
for another manifestation 
of myself.
From San Francisco Bay 
I rush 
along the spread fingers 
of the Sacramento River.
You pull back your curtains,
open your windows 
in the darkness
and You welcome Me
like Bethlehem
welcoming starlight.

		

Photo by Mark Basarab on Unsplash