i watch the land through the window thinking, Land, let me
come, your haggard angel falling through this

relentless sky & i––wing-snagged, wind-hollowed
where sagebrush splits the smell of me will arrive       

part ghost, part resin with my manzanita shine
blood-red in fog, as bladder pod bursting

the wrong sound: bright yellow laughter, too round
too alive & too wild for the funeral on the side

of this constant highway where coyotes call
across it to cross this canyon their barbed hungers

sharpened by roads where brush once moved
down from Santa Ana Mountains, past gnarled scrub oak

wildfire scars silhouetted behind me, before mountain lion,
trickster bird, where husks of toys melt into curbside tar

& a swing still sways above scorched earth where turkey vulture
shadows back roads beneath power lines on base

where buckwheat rusts beside the memory of bees: warning
my hurried song: no time for collapse where i do not remember

which way was Paradise?
while a burnt swing still trembles

in her wake