Flood of '69

I want to tell you boulder stories.
Explain the weightlessness of sandstone
balanced above a curving road, a home,

how its red and girth and beige—
but you know about distraction
and how rock stories

turn into stories about the rain.
How our mountain rain falls
in chunks of forty days and nights,

shoves itself down the withered throat
of the watershed, swirls across
speckled bedroom linoleum

and creeks through our kitchen windows,
torrents charcoaled sumac along the damp
remains of Chumash trails.

Our rain releases the boulders that crush
an old man against his white Frigidaire
just as he reaches for a bottle of Coke.

Our canyon rain swallows us, whole families
at a time, sleeping under the warm quilts
of our grandmothers and ferns and oak trees

while the mud overtakes us,
drags our Mary Janes and blue
Fiestaware into the raging divide.

Canyon rain is not the rain of Noah, rain
of rebirth. Our canyon rain strips the dirt
from the skin and bones of our world.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2009