Another Harvest

for Mike Tuggle, poet laureate

of Sonoma County, 2008-2009

after his Healdsburg City Hall reading

Let a poem write you.

Remember, if you are still alive

time’s on your side.--M. T.

My heart, greedy as a seventh sense,

combs the vineyards, waits for a hawk

to float-three flaps-float over the rows

of winter-trim vines, turning now--

here, maroon, yellow, there,

and on the foothills above the valley crops,

crimson, lit orange in this late midwinter light

moving toward darkness. We’ve passed

the drunken season of harvest’s dregs,

when the unpicked bunches melt to wine:

bitter air over the highway. Now

only splendor roams among the twisted grasp

of color grabbing stakes to stand,

the hawk rising under the settling light.

You’re an old man, limping with a new knee.

My feet drag, won’t lift when I walk. Yet

your words, carved from the rich debris

of ocean, love, the hills of Cazadero,

of the poet’s lonely, lovely life, strum

to my heartbeat, a bloodline back

to memory, my self as a wild child, free,

fleet in meadows of timothy on an Ohio farm.

I want everything you said:

a housepainter’s soprano singing for him,

an Okie’s dry retreat to California,

trading walnut trees for oaks,

the body of shadows that cover the hills.

I want all of my life, my debris, still gathering.