up that long two-mile climb on the highway
in the midst of a thick, thick May day—grey and wet,
no shadows fell across the pavement, yet
strangely bright. The wind came like a billowing
winter bedsheet pulled across bare limbs.
I shivered like December—the sweat, or fog,
repelling down my neck.
Only the fog creeping, creeping
over and between the trees along the winding road.
The view like giant leaps from one thing to the next,
and in-between the silence
only footfalls and breathing, only the motion of my body.
I saw the bright and total greyness puffing up behind a line of trees when
something came crashing in:
Reach your long hand out to another door, beyond where
you go on the street, the street
where everyone says, “how are you?”
and no one says How aren’t you?
And after that a soft and gentle whisper
came and went inside my head: I am.
I looked across the world in front of me.
The wide and wondering Bay, Candlestick,
San Bruno—white rectangles and black zig-zags
and moving squares and dots. Beneath my feet the deep green
of wet grass. The muddy trickles of yesterday’s rain.
The brown, brown, brown and grey of rocks, the smoky specks
of moss, and the constant grey—the East Bay out there somewhere.
and roads and rocks and dirt
and hills and fallen leaves, the hiddenness—
I was alone. Alone and wet and out of breath.
I stopped and looked and looked and looked
across and at and into everything and all there was
I am.
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