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.