Crane Creek

I watch the sun run a sleep hand over her neck, all the blond hair running one way, illuminated. We walk between dry hills inside fields and decide together that the air which has brushed over this land for so many years has picked up something citrus, something fermented, like the tip end of marijuana or an old wine rim. We agree that it must be the combination of cow shit, the heat inside trapped in the rows of vineyards, and the dry grass shooting up wherever it can. The dense california soil underneath its fruit lets us use our whole palettes, we can take in both the deep and the shallow, both the bright and the glue.

As we walk, I handle the weeds. These tall grasses are capped with heads that mimic insect bodies. Some have small bleached bee heads, others have the long-dead-wingless dragon fly bodies. The last, some kind thistle, are dried out giant house flies, pears with tuffs of broom-heads coming out from its skin. Together these weeds blow magic into the eye--what a floating texture! It's too complex to see at once, we only stare at one patch at a time, because when we try to take in the entire space this nomadic tribe of blond whistles bowing and raising, causes the eye to melt into syrup until we have glazed faces.

We walk back to the car on the eroded road next to the vineyards.  She tells me a story of a women she met abroad who had orchards and vineyards and table grapes. They ate the grapes together out of a blue ceramic bowl--the grapes neon--yellow and red and purple. Each one tasting like a plum pregnant with a lime, or at least that is how imagine her face to look when she popped the pearls into her mouth. We stop fifty feet away from the car by the creek, where a beastly bush of blackberries is growing over the cattle fence. She is taller than me and can reach the top of the bushel, where the big bloated ones are waiting to be snatched by birds.  She bites into them like tomatoes, and I watch the spread of liquid purple river down her palm and puddle on the top of her canvas shoe. I wait for a sour one, but no come because there are no sour ones today; only sugar cubes--i imagine us with the straw mouths of hummingbirds, sticky and wet.

I stop to pee behind a lichen eaten oak and I relish in the event of peeing outside. It's something I love, the sound of the metal belt thudding against the dirt. I prop my self by palming the dry ridged skin of the tree, and watch tenderly the grass below me dance under the yellow-eyed stream.