poetry
gloria
When queried about her heritage,
she flashes a broad smile and says
both of her parents were Mexican.
In her mid-eighties, she still works
part-time when jobs are available:
cleaning houses and the rooms
of local motels; washing and ironing
clothes; and helping her great-grandson
with yard work. She has lived
her entire life in a small adobe house
at the base of “A” Mountain. During
the hot months of May, June, and July,
she opens her screened windows
and doors, with but a ceiling fan
to keep the air moving, only during
the hottest part of the day. She learned
early on that the best friends of her life
would number
three:
Photos only
by Max
Kandler Wind,
Sun, and Dust; that these she could
always count on. Evenings, after
Sun retires for the night and Dust
settles gently on her roof, yuccas,
ocotillos and agaves like the laying
on of hands, she anticipates the certain
arrival of Wind, swirling her rustling
skirt, whispering non-stop, till Gloria
falls soundly asleep, the mellifluous,
innocuous murmurs of her gossip.
by Larry D. Thomas
Under a rain of rock
Here are the graywackes—those immature aggregates
of quartz, mica, feldspar and volcanic fragments, all
mushed in a matrix of chlorite, clay, and crushed shale.
Here are the cherts—those ribboned red-and-green rafters
upon spreading plates through the deepest depths beyond
and below the reach of sands and the rains of lime.
Here are the greenstones—those moss-mantled, chloritic,
zeolitic , metabasaltic veterans of ocean-continent
collisions, ophilolitic thrusts, and olistostromal slides.
Here are the blueschists— those amphibolitic-garnitic
hammer-ringers that explored the limits of huge pressure
and sort-of-huge heat below in Benioff’s basement.
Here are the serpentines—those slick-scaled, green-black,
friction-polished, water-sated, asbestos-bearing,
buoyant wanderers from the base of an ocean’s crust.
Here they all are in this chaotic slip-sliding mess of a mélange
that is the California Coast Range, and there they all were
when he held a hose on a wildland fire below a bulldozer,
when one of the them escaped the root ball of a toppled oak
and very nearly crushed him one split instant before buckling
the heavy steel siding of the engine and falling at his toes
in an encounter of boulder and not-yet geologist who would
now not fully mind dying under a rain of rock, provided he
could first know the name of that which would do the crushing.
by David M. Orchard
Cenizo
First Quarter 2015
21