Page 58 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #9

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Benchmarks
Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers —William Faulkner
Walk past wild radish and California
golden poppies, beyond a pond lined in cattails and home to mallards, continue down a slope, an easy jog, a stretch of buckeye trees,
the spring’s white candelabra,
bay live oak and laurel undulate like dancers
in a scrim of sunlight, journey to the first bench near purple periwinkles where I married
an oak tree.
Raised myself, ambled past
brambles of blackberry, past poison hemlock, the canyon shaded in sword ferns
and stinging nettles, a tale of a girl
who gathered plants from graveyards
to help swan-changed brothers, stayed
at the second bench until a lover flew south.
I can almost see
the hill where in a dream I found
a chorus of iris smudged with faces—
The third bench is memorialized
to the Jalquin people,
one of the Ohlone that used to call the area home, surrounded by orange and yellow monkey flowers, purple thistle, almost there.
LeNore WeIss