You gentle mountains
round, folded like a sleeping woman,
you stretch under baking sun,
curl beneath stars
in sheets of fog.
Your deer comb the grass,
lizards drum the dust.
A crow calls,
the sun falls.
In courtship a boy
plays a flute
answered
by quail.
First published in Foggy Dog: Poems of the Pacific Coast.
Joe Cottonwood has built or repaired hundreds of houses in his day job as carpenter/contractor. Nights, he writes. His latest book is Foggy Dog: Poems of the Pacific Coast.
Photograph of Shelter Cove in Humbolt County, California, by Tomas Sennett. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
califragile.org 