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5 California Corridor On the San Joaquin Line between Modesto & Merced, past the arroyos, past the fruit trees in rows, rows—hands of the farm workers/ beauty always with blood behind it, nothing free. The holding tank & the drainage ditch, the cast-off trucks of the workers, woman & child wait for the angels of bread to swoop down & bring the night with them, covering her & her baby, feeding them, saying sleep, sleep. This day, California is a wide, wide lover—sweet & slightly off-key in its song. Wacky & loose, the train rumbles through Richmond, Martinez, ocean on the left, gang tags on the right beside the paper mills, refineries, the brown, brown hills— then explosion of jacaranda (red flower!) more mounds of brown, beautiful red, a young couple playing cards across the aisle: does she know the way he looks at her is what people spend lives looking for? They’re laughing/curling into each other—he in his little skid hat/she’s in a striped tee—this kind of desire the most radiant—from the body outward— No way to be in CA & not feel frontier— so many suffering drought/poverty/ only the hills outlast us— How to have body/space/land of the mind/ knowing the ravaged? Be awake in it, one rail tie at a time. I want to be in the open— Out here, the land grows wild hair on the side of the tracks the way a dead man grows his— 6 dry, stickly—so stray—going to a place no one knows. Mountains are the only salvation— windmills on the left, “Golden West” train on the right, truck junkyard: You left your soul in LA, the guy across the aisle says to his friend. Then why does he look so alive? I was here, I was loved. Were you? We go through Pittsburg, CA—factories shut down here, too—where I met Wild Bill. Blue blue cerulean next to brown dead hills— otherworldly with the windmills— standing water, huge pallets for transport & we are riding through a feeling—suspension— Nothing, nothing can be done right now/ we are free. Then all aboard in Antioch: a skate punk kickflips his board & sits down, hoodie w/skull & hat backwards , I love him for his pose, brilliantly indestructible. ...

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