Wind Poppies and Chinese Purple Houses after Rough Fire

A SHORT STUDY OF BREATH

We rub stalks of rosin weed and hold

our fingers to each other's nostrils, both

of us inhaling deeply. Late summer, the air

opening a small slope in the brain

that flowers with ever-increasing

abundance, the neural energy shooting out

vines, panicles, corymbs, spikes, racemes, umbels--

burgeoning, blossoming, dying back

and supplanted, our breath taken in

by these creatures and given back

so tenderly and diffusely--no one yet ever

recording the impact from the breath

of this flora on people or vice versa. The year

my grandfather was mustard-gassed in France,

Native Americans were setting up their last

encampments in these hills. A hundred

and forty years or so after the Spanish

first wandered here, my father was shipped out

to Guam where he remained as Friant Dam

was constructed, a dam that nearly wiped out

all flora and fauna on the valley floor,

the fire-bombings causing great fire storms

that sucked oxygen from the air, incinerating

those caught in merciless winds. You propose

a short study of breath before time finally

catches up to these hills. I propose that, for

a decade or two, we observe the flora growing

on this small slope where the barbed wire fence

suddenly ends, before the subdivisions are dropped.

For the price of a bomber, we could ensure

that numerous experimental subjects are healthy

and fed well enough to experience fully

the unspeakably lovely flora, and we could

then record how fresh air affects the human brain.

Then we could establish the exact

connection to us of all wild, breathing creatures.

Magical Musical Trip