I went down to Green Ridge to watch a friend’s house
while he went east to bury his father’s ashes.
Four walls, a roof, no fuss.
A riot of garden all around,
succulents and olive trees,
basil and pine.
I was reading a lot of geology, a lot of weather,
trying to get the story of it just right.
How the Pacific High was throwing wind
our way and the wind made fog
and the tectonic plates
made mountains that
blocked the fog and grew redwood trees.
I love even the sounds
of these big movements.
Subduction and Coreolis, lithic and morphic and upwelling and deposition.
And then I go out to pick nettles and realize that
all of my life I have been wrong
about which is the stinging and which is the hedge nettle.
Names for everyday plants,
long committed to memory, wrongly so.
I don’t know anything.
I make a tea of the hedge nettle anyway. Lemony smelling
and all kinds of green. To have mistaken which of
the nettles give a sting,
to have not noticed even that.
Such a thing.
Vultures circle below the garden,
riding the rising heat.
I watch them through the steam of the tea.
I think they are vultures.
In fact, I insist.
