Land of the Esselen

Take the bodies of the land and the sea.
Grind them together for thirty million
    summers
and something’s bound to chip off.

Look. Not even the heart is left
    unscathed;
hunks of Sierran granite spilled
up and down the coast;
the continent’s bones scattered
across the exposed sea floor
from Bodega Head and Point Reyes in
    the north,
past the Farallons, Pinos and Lobos
down to that plutonic shard the Spanish
    named
“the South,” where you may have heard
an older people, beyond the cliff,
up the canyon, under the shadows
of the white peak, the red giants; who
spoke in ways foreign to their neighbors.

In that country, all was life,
everything thinking;
rock was memory, and nothing
was too inhuman
to have a name.

© 2014–15 Kaweah