but boisterous—brazen as they blew about
like tiny stadium pennants: orange opiate omens.
Along the foothill road, our car wove among
the grazing cattle—a metal stitching—lacing their black
and white patches into the meadow, darning them into the boulders.
We turned north at the Forks, since it seemed well to
go where moss chose to grow, on the shadier side
of a Sequoia grove.
The tree-line was blurred in some unsullied latitude,
a line that few crossed consciously—no sign mapped it—
just a scalped patch of scrub oak as we slipped away into the sky.
Hear this poem