Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,
a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east as the drifts of warm air make a channel;
it moves its own way, like water or the mind,
and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch it as the last snow flurries before summer, observed only by the wakened marmots at ten thousand feet,
and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon sprouting
along a creek above Sonora Pass next August,
where the snowmelt will have trickled into Dead Man’s Creek and the creek spilled into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into the San Joaquin and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes of the bay.
That’s not the end of it: the gray jays of the meadow eat the larkspur seeds, which cannot propagate otherwise.
To simulate the process, you have to soak the gathered seeds all night in the acids of coffee
and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before you plant them in the garden.
You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa’s kitchen, visiting.
There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase, stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;
the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the blessing of dispersal—
it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense, lasting as long as the poppies last.
- Human Wishes by Robert Hass
