i think of this poem i wrote about eight years ago. Almost every morning i walk out to get the newspaper in the morning. i often stop and pause,  looking at the mountain, a steep hill really, with the sun peeking over her apex, and i imagine this land, this high desert nestled by the Pacific when Richard Henry Dana entered the bay on the Boston brig Pilgrim in 1935, an area with a population of about 200.

Mount Miguel on a February Sunrise

East north east of my front door,
Mount Miguel wore a shroud this morning;
The low clouds draped across her shoulders
below the peak at sunrise.

By circumstance, the front door of my home faces east,
greeting the sun god
like the Navajo’s hogan door has done for centuries
over in the Four Corners a mountain or so
east of here.

Man’s antennae now reach skyward on Mount Miguel’s peak,
black in silhouette against the rising orange orb, which will later
sling its white hot heat and light low to the south,
moving through the day,
bowing to the Baja lands of Mexico,
as it is wont to do in the winter months
here in the high desert.

The instruments of new fangled transmission look foreboding:
Spanish castle towers of the inquisition;
I wonder if the Kumayai sat atop,
above the cloud shroud,
lifting their own clouds of smoke,
transmitting their own news of the day.

The city folks implanted here
tend to forget what this land beneath them was;
really is.
We have learned to just add water
to get paradise,
now overrun with those that forget
to look East at the sunrise
silhouettes of the ghost talkers.

Bonita, California

February 25, 2007