From the Pacific Ocean the land sprawled eastward
wide and flat, crossed by dry stream beds
and arroyos carved by twice-a-century rainstorms
— gullies roughened with dust-coated weedy scrub
that sheltered small brown lizards.
The hills heaved from that unpromising plain
oily green, sage-scented, parched by fickle seasons
that promised relief and delivered none.
We settled there, bewitched by the sky
and the thundering shore, by perfumed
orange groves felled as neighborhoods
bullied their way into bouquet branches,
all shoulders and boot prints, unforgiving.
Once it snowed, and occasionally the ground
would rupture in displeasure as we clung
uselessly to doorframes, the doors bruising
our hips in their undulant dance. We wrote
letters to pen pals in places we had not yet invaded
and saw how astronomers envisioned space travel
in the little book we bought at the observatory
after sitting under the dome of the starstruck sky.
We could pretend the everpresent shushing rumble
of cars was really the sea and even if the seashells
and the pelicans vanished from the water’s edge
we would not blame our hunger, our eagerness
to erase the landscape’s flaws and our own,
to be made perfect, to be discovered
at the luncheon counter of desire.

© j.i. kleinberg