Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

Research Trail, Cold Canyon, November

Research Trail, Cold Canyon, November Solano County Direction: bronze knee-snagging flower-head, unsprung from the weathered bank. Direction down: bird; bird song Direction utterly still: longstanding gold lichens on boulders. Or late, late: nicker, sunset feather-ribs. Or passage under: soft holes in the trail—everywhere, burrows. Re-routing: arrowhead wedge of muskrat or possum skull, a jewel-box with teeth for clasp. Aim as it says? Course up: hillrise—itsassociates, manzanita, blue oak, digger pine, buckeye. The pitch of a slope suddenly too breakneck, root, shoe, sole-slip, but just above that, cinch, thinkable again. Back to the carcass:desiccated muscle of a tail— broken leather watchband. It looks like an abrupt little dinosaur, hair bedding thrown off to wake it. Throw cover back over. Slip back to the pitch of the hill: plant tibias, skeletal fall 5° Research Trail, Cold Canyon, November village of spring's old plants, a snit of framed junked sketches of lupine, finished fennel, seeded mustard. Sociogeology: an artist's landfill. Climbing upslope more slowly than fire, scraping through dried yarrow foam, I hear the quick side-changing of opposite hummingbirds. Fire gate. Listen for: Californiathrasher, northern pygmy owl, white-throated swift, warblers, flycatchers. Listen for fire. Bones and leather: Could it have been "the rare cinnamon opossum"? Skunks nibble on dead ones. Muskrat has webbed feet but similar tail—it's "reddish to dark brown," shorter than possum. Possums climb a tree "to eat a ripe persimmon." Confusing book sketches dusky-footedwood rat. Those white claws and silk boots = muskrat.Hind feet partially webbed. Swims backward or forward with ease. Fox, cougar, or owl may have got it. "Their interesting mouths remain shut to water while the incisors, out front, munch away at succulent underwater stems." Did I see Si an underwater mouth? But it pointed here: I'm stone-benched in an abounding dried garden of giant paper leaves neither shrunken nor crushed (the deer keeping to their path). I'm sitting in the tall dried ray-flowers, pine-board-faded-whiskey color, their involucres flying, dried waving their gold. In circles of basalleaves the size of many eagle-feather headdresses laid on the ground, hill-skirts. I sit among preserved whisks of itinerant air, the ears of the rise. Wyethia angustifolia: mule's ears: "Calf Compass-Plant": "An innate love for the mysterious and poetical makes people wish to believe in strange and beautiful tales" that claim its leaves stand edges always pointing N &S. "When beauty achieves great subtlety, the Japanese call the effect shibui restrained elegance only time can reveal, an aged tea, scenery of a gray, brown, or moss-green color, the impression one gets from looking at the face of a certain kind of older person." "The end of growth, the final stage" parched, above the rushing island-making stream. T W O : T R A I L S SI Research Trail, Cold Canyon, November Someone said: "You're between books." As if you could ever be at one, as you are never "at" a trail. I look at my unsure feet: Allmillennial support is for the garden, for the wildest. Then look away: Did you see the creekside cormorant spiral?—three times—widely— just to clear the 300' dam. As if, when you arrive here, you become one of the old folk, your colors having been green passing, ripe black purpling, pale and crimped, yellowed, goldened, drabbed, aired. You are very, very old, and people shaped like arrowheads find such preservation as you are in the dry garden. The stone tools find you, their museum. Look, I say to myself turning, the young blue oaks are more earth's progeny now than I. They think the winding needs the watch, not otherwise. Far away, in the ruins of civilizations, earth colors crawl from frescoes. The planet spins them off. The trail whirls into a helix of dust. When I was in labor, friends read me bleak poetry. Read more, I harped, until a new thing turns our heads.£3 ...