Birthday
It’s four thirty on a cloudless day and we are in the cemetery where my father’s parents are buried. Today would have been his sixty-seventh birthday. There is no wind, and the sun burns my neck. My head is on her shoulder and her arms draw me in and I can feel death, the weight of California. The black oaks are heavy under that paper sky, and the milk concrete of the mausoleums screams along the drying expanse of grass. I can hear the mourning doves and for once in my life, I wish I could not. My tears are beading down the front of her jacket in synthetic drops. I try to dab them with a tissue, and she smiles, “You baptized me.”
Psalm
The California fires had all but razed the milky pines and manzanitas along the coast, on Highway 1, against Bixby Bridge and into Big Sur. Only their blackened corpses remained, stark against the bright coyote brush and mustard seed. I round a bend going north and all of a sudden I feel him, him and God, closer than I have felt them since his body was burned in January, since I’ve taught myself to whisper amen among those cathedral trees. My mouth and lungs twist, my head is thrown back into hymn, my unashamed tears come fast. A sliver of gentle sage sky gleams belly up along the horizon. I thank you, and God for this.
Brentwood
Eleven fifty pm. We are in Brentwood at a gas station arguing, kind of, kissing eachother with words about the placement of the milky way. You say our planet is inside of it and so we can’t see the forest for the trees. I think it's a banner above us. On the drive down, I asked you to pull off the 5 so we could see the stars. There were layers and layers of them. I played Slowdive until you said it wasnt good roadtrip music. We listened to your playlists until we got to Los Angeles. In that gas station, I could still feel those star layers. I held them with me as I waited for you to fill the tank, as we argued about the milky way. I didn’t tell you I had them in my fist, I didn’t tell you how it felt like God. I really loved you that night in Brentwood, and loved you still at the taco truck outside of Whole Foods an hour later. You kept me awake because you had so much to show me and we had so little time. All I wanted to show you were the stars off I-5 and I dont think you really saw them.
You pulled me through those purple veins by heart, Culver City to Santa Monica among the shopping cart homes, half built hotels and eternal neon. The streets you loved gnashing, they clawed you back to southern California. In the passenger's seat I could feel them gripping your ankles, at midnight finally on Pico, you took me to the park with the people sleeping on concrete benches and the bleached jacarandas, this was where you played pickup basketball with the guy who stole your jersey. It wasnt summer yet, I watched the ink lawns race from the window, I pretended LA meant something big. You wrote stories on every curb and smashed my head into them. Here, you said, here is where I cherished every single breath I took, every single grey morning under the shoelace cables in the sky, the stray cats, the elementary school. I nodded and I really loved you, the parts of you I knew, and tried to love the part that I did not.
Sea Ranch
I wish I had painted Sea Ranch. Wish I had caught those milky blue in the pines, everything was salty and the grass bleached through spring. How stoic and silent those houses were, flat roofed redwood beams, tiny portal windows. Their bodies understood the breath of the landscape and were built in tandem. Of course; an irregular cottage, also salty, swept into the side of this hill, makes sense here. Communal library self-checkout, Donnie Darko on VCR, screaming in her basement and we were a little too young to hold that wonder through ‘till the morning but we did anyway, taking pictures while making pancakes.