Mount Miguel February Sunrise

This is the second in a series of revisions to existing poetry submitted to Vanderbilt for consideration of acceptance into their MFA program for creative writing:

East north east of my front door,
Mount Miguel wore a shroud this morning;
Low clouds draped across her shoulders
below the peak at sunrise.

By circumstance, my front door faces east,
greeting the sun god
like the Navajo’s hogan door has done for centuries
over in Four Corners, a mountain or so
east of here.

Man’s antennae now reach skyward
on Mount Miguel’s peak,
silhouetted black against the rising orange orb,
before it slings white hot heat and light low to the south,
moving through the day,
bowing to the Baja lands of Mexico,
as it is wont to do in the winter months
here in the high desert.

The instruments of new fangled transmission look foreboding:
Spanish castle towers of the inquisition;
I wonder if the Kumayai once sat atop,
above the cloud shroud,
lifting their own clouds of smoke,
transmitting their own news of the day.

The city folks implanted here
tend to forget what this land beneath them was;
really is.
We have learned to just add water
to get paradise,
now overrun with those that forget
to look East at the sunrise
silhouettes of the ghost talkers.

Obits at Sixty-Seven

i do not know why
my hands turn the pages to
the obits
and
my eyes scan the listings there;
i am not from here,
and
not likely to know anyone
heralded as dead here,
and
if i did know someone
buried there in the obits,
i would already know
their kin, their age,
the disease or what it was
which killed them;
so why do i go there?
i ask myself with
no real answer;
yet
i go there almost daily,
scanning, reading the curious obits,
hoping i really won’t know anyone listed there,
passing by most of the really aged,
perhaps because i ain't there yet,
wondering
who these dead folks really were,
what were they really like,
if they died nobly,
how their loved ones feel, really feel,
about this death thing
and
what made them write or contribute
the words to the obit,
including or omitting pertinent facts
and
what were those omitted facts
and
realizing i am sad they are gone,
but
perhaps because
i am getting a bit long in the tooth,
i go to the obits
and
i am damn glad
it’s not me
listed in the obits.

Bonita, California
January 19, 2011