Rain won’t affect bamboo’s determination
to flower. The sand has no choice of where
it will blow, on what night, into which barrio,
whose eye. Nothing is certain. (To know this
truth is easy to know.) Say Hemingway
came here, 1941, to write ad copy for Ballantine Ale: Purity, Body, Flavor.
Ground buckles up in Los Angeles. June 29,
2001. The center of gravity shifts; the sleeping
shore slips. One thousand year old monzogranite falls
on a wild sheep. I saw one once, its big horn
jutting out of the ledge’s profile,
like an ampersand, misplaced.
Blink & it’s gone.