sometimes poems work better than prose.

The View of Point Reyes from Guatemala

A sweep of shoreline
known crevice by crevice
and old trees stretching tall quiet limbs to the sky
(and each drop in those clouds
might have trickled through
my fingers, or evaporated
from my pores)
expands beyond the photo's edge.

It's been six months since it was real to me.

My current horizons cramp
and buckle, bearing too much weight.
Miserly, they bargain: no sunset without
the shadow falling on
uninsulated homes
of corrugated steel, no tree
left to grow longer
than until its wood comes needed,
no body close
without the squelch
of looming separation.

I scrabble for beauty among the drifted trash,
and find it
amply
but mingled always with pain:
bold textiles binding twisted limbs,
an eye of water waiting
to be blinked out by its crater's dissolution,
smoke scratched into the sky
by burning garbage, open fires,
the US' cast off engines,
at the same time scratching years
off lungs.

When I go back
to salt-glazed rocks, deep roots, a generous sky
I fear
I'll be the hungry proud
rejecting charity, resenting
the open-handedness of nature there
when elsewhere she is found
so tightly clenched.