But word is carved in bone-dry canyons
Resolute in their refusal to be anything but stone.
The hills, a white burn, have surrendered to sun,
The overhanging summer oaks extend past Vance's kiln,
Beyond McVicar's and Grizzly Canyon.
The black pond picks up all the darkness of the sky,
Emerald algae blooming deep below the surface
Crisscrossed by blue dragonflies, in surprise formations
That navigate across the sheet of debris,
To track what lies between, with the intangible radar
Of the mind of detection, at the guise of mosquito skeet.
They are everywhere, like heavenly spheres
Refracted out of atmospheres in the globe below,
Transparent enough and ephemeral enough
For us to need faith they exist, for the poem
Is drawn by hands unknown, for reasons unknowable,
And will not show itself, no matter how much absence we feel.
