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Capitan Gap


Capitan Gap

You look through the broken skyline of burnt trees
still hugging the ridge some 3 years after the fire.
The clouds build up over the Sacramentos
like some sort of meringue-
ominous,
multi-hued,
whites and grays.

Your cooler is full--
the food you ate replaced with freezer bags full of raspberries
harvested from the ridges
in bundles of 4 or 5 to a bush
and 4 or 5 bushes every square yard.

The raspberries are every where,
and after eating handfuls
you settle into collecting, gathering, relishing in the harvest
that only a natural cycle can bring.

The memories return of you on a hillside,
younger,
talking and playing,
gathering raspberries in a neighbor's wild yard.

There is nothing mundane about this memory:
the red stain on your cuticles,
scrapes from pulling bushes up
and moving further into the patch unaware of time--
the slow monumental decay of daylight.
Rain will come,
you think,
and you'll return to your life
of electronic gadgets
and trying to look busy
by killing time with what passes for work these days.

It's not often that you really hear the wind,
the buzz of fly,
the long slow rumble of distant thunder.
Rain will come and too many raspberries will fall,
go not gathered until next year

August 22, 2010
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