Swink Magazine,

 SONG FOR EL CERRITO
   
I used to hate its working-class bungalows, grid planning,
power-lines sawing hillsides. It ashamed me

the way my parents did for not making more money.
Now it looks like a Diebenkorn.

Now I want even the bad wood siding
in our living room, and my mother’s aging books

on modern Indian thought.  Her tanpura
resting in sunlight. Fox-weed in railway trestles,

endangered frogs in our gully.
I want a lemon tree.

On San Pablo, polyester collectibles, a folk-song store,
the “All-Button Emporium: Open 10-4 only Saturday’s.”

How did love lodge in these?
Marigold light 

forgives even the traffic islands.
December only yellows gingkoes and reddens the maples.

A stream smells rich under our house.
For Christmas, my sister and I steal

persimmons from neighbors’ yards. 
Ten years on, I discover

how I keep falling in love here
among pickups and blackberry brambles.

Tonight it happened again:
We drove a bad car to the beach.

At dusk, a lone scrub pine--
clear, like a Japanese print.  In the real sky, the moon

slid through clouds that were cinder-colored.