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1.
A rattlesnake moves from grass
To grass across the path I am walking
Back to the head of the trail.
Trail at beginnings and endings.
But path when you are carried away
By the earth that surrounds you.
So Santiago Creek cuts a path or trail
To the river, which, when it moves,
Moves past houses to the sea.
And down this path or trail—which coyotes
Travel from the canyon to prey on cats
In the houses’ yards—water sometimes makes its way.
The way of water, neither path nor trail,
Which Lao Tzu likened to the life
Of the wise, because water
“Is beneficent to all things
But does not contend and stays in places
Which others would despise.”
2.
When the county was all ranches
And churches in the nineteenth century
A submerged dam was built across
Santiago Creek. It reaches down to
The bedrock and forces groundwater
To the surface, where water gathers still
In a small reservoir that overflows
The arid path of the creek. Through ivy
And willows, a little current courses
In the stream bed below the dam.
The sound of that water as it goes
Is one voice of one watershed—
Santiago Creek, named for Saint James,
The saint whose body is the object
Of a pilgrimage in northern Spain,
A camino the restless faithful
Have coursed through for centuries,
To pause and linger and then pass on.
3.
He was a fisherman, one Jesus
Offered to make a fisher of men.
A young man, bright, bored with his lot,
Of the right age to be converted
To a high purpose.
He would not have looked
At the coast live oaks on the hill
As I do, with envy and a measure
Of identification, old
Inhabitants of the land around the creek.
Aldo Leopold describes how the bur oaks
Of Wisconsin survive prairie fires
Because of their “bark too thick
To scorch” and so stand out
From the forests that are always
At risk from the dead grass.
Roots set down in a dry place—
Oaks, the relics of my watershed.
4.
Between root and path
We live in the city—
Boisterous schoolyards, farmers’
Markets, congregated dayworkers,
Grocery carts in the creek.
And there is a garden with
Flowering honeysuckle
Growing on a trellis.
We raise our daughter here.
As each child learns
The language of her mother
And her intonations and inflections,
She hears the songs of the thrushes
And the desert wind.
Coleridge, who wished
His child to “see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language,” nature,
Had, like me, the love of a child
Of the city for the wild,
As likely my daughter will too—
Who gasps at the sudden white
Peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains
After an early spring rain.
5.
The mariposa lily grows
On our hillsides, among
The manzanita and sage.
Mariposa because the interior
Of its petals are speckled
Like a butterfly’s wings.
Risen from the ground, it lives
Out the dry summer
With its uncommon beauty
Among the wild coyotes and rattlesnakes
And inhabitants who speak
In many languages, but most often
In one of two, English or Spanish,
The languages that meet
In the name of Santiago Creek
As in the name of a summer flower
That can be found, at times, along
The path that opens as you go.
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Mariposa Lily
Santiago Oaks Regional Park - March 2008
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