toad who claims that change is possible,

And all the other life too small to name.

First one, then another, until innumerable

they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.

Yes, it’s hard to stand still, hour after hour,

fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers

snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.

And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone

can bear to be a stone, the pain

the grass endures breaking through the earth’s crust.

Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,

rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall

and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.

The old windmill creaks in perfect time

to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,

and the last farmhouse light goes off.

Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt

these hills and packs of feral dogs.

But standing here at night accepts all that.

You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,

moving more slowly than the crippled stars,

part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,

Part of the grass that answers the wind,

part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows

there is no silence but when danger comes.

A CALIFORNIA REQUIEM

I walked among the equidistant graves

New planted in the irrigated lawn.

The square, trim headstones quietly declared

The impotence of grief against the sun.

There were no outward signs of human loss.

No granite angel wept beside the lane.

No bending willow broke the once-rough ground

Now graded to a geometric plane.

My blessed California, you are so wise.

You render death abstract, efficient, clean.

Your afterlife is only real estate,

And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

I would have left then. I had made my one

Obligatory visit to the dead.

But as I turned to go, I heard the voices,

Faint but insistent. This is what they said.

“Stay a moment longer, quiet stranger.

Your footsteps woke us from our lidded cells.

Now hear us whisper in the scorching wind,

Our single voice drawn from a thousand hells.

“We lived in places that we never knew.

We could not name the birds perched on our sill,

Or see the trees we cut down for our view.

What we possessed we always chose to kill.

“We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim,

And when we died, they laid us on her breast,

But she refuses us—until we earn

Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.

“We are so tiny now—light as the spores

That rotting clover sheds into the air,

Dry as old pods burnt open by the sun,

Barren as seeds unrooted anywhere.

“Forget your stylish verses, little poet—

So sadly beautiful, precise, and tame.

We are your people, though you would deny it.

Admit the justice of our primal claim.

“Become the voice of our forgotten places.

Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.

We are like shadows the bright noon erases,