Threat from Above

Two people were killed Saturday at 12:25 pm when their single-engine plane crashed into a rugged canyon near a residential neighborhood north of Mulholland Dr. The people on board were having an extramarital affair.

— Los Angeles Daily News

First we saw smoke, then the whole thing tipped, like a glass of milk,

  and met the hillside. How unlikely;   as if the sky had made a promise

it couldn’t keep. That day the brush was so dry it creaked;

  I pressed my ear to the ground   and heard the muffled shouts

of a man and woman fighting, like an ocean in a conch shell.

  At once everything   I touched turned slippery.

So rarely do we know the names for things that happen to us.

  That night, we collected bits of the wreckage   caught in the moonlight like silver minnows.

Morbid, our parents said once we made them into jewelry.

  In that sense, they resembled every key   to every house I’ve lived in ever since,

and everything we knew about love: ghostly and forbidden.