To the Hills of California, Overrun by Medusahead Grass

Strip me to the monolingualism of home.
Strip me to a final flora, a color.
You are the total hue outside my window.
I look up to see you, inexhaustibly receiving my gaze, more loyal than gravity.
The tint above empty cars.
The jangling of swings in the playground.
Strip me your summery gold, which is theft admixed with murder.
You are my tongue and your one yelp means foreign intruder.
How many generations before you started calling here home?
(Do you still hear the deergrass and threeawn?)
You nudge aside bitter dirt and I watch.
You stem without sight or hearing.
I grub with a loosened cerebrum to be with you.
You grow undeterminedly, without intelligence.
I close my eyes and intend nothing.
We enthrall towards light.
We are purer than the pons.
 
 
What is the genius of your triumph?
When home is the taint of displacement, when its process of expansion does not blink or shudder, what can I see?
Bent stems on bare knees, leaves driven into my wrists and palms.
In March, you suck metalloids from the earth and load dirt into your body. When you die, your dried skin covers my neighborhood’s hills with gold leafing.
Your corpse is as smooth as a fresh needle.
Your stem has the width of a nerve.
The awns of your unfinished seeds are finer than eyelashes.
 
 
Because you live less than a year, I must practice carving out all memory of season.
I lie on your blades carefully.
It is day and the day warms. (The world warms and warms.)
Like you, I choose soil too clayed for other roots to bridle.
I adjust the exposure of my skin while you watch.
Finding a version that does not shift, I drowse and dilate in a long wavelength frequency.
The days are chiral to each other.
You, idol.
 
 
But have you dissembled recently?
The man in orange polyamide walks as if he knows your secret.
He goes back and forth as methodically as the tide.
O burning bush burning
Death by fire has the look of proper chronology about it.
I watch it happen, your steady reduction.
A black patch with hot red trim has girdled your yellow.
You leap like a cry, but your body is so small.
O burning bush burning
What will be left after your controlled burns?
Will it be the secret you disclosed to me years ago?
Running a finger along your stalk, purring when I moved one way but cutting me when I did the opposite, as if in your skin you held a knife.
O burning bush burning
You had sewn your grassy hide with silica. It was to choke native vegetation, to defeat cattle: immortal silica of my generation, our expansive intelligence, endless data. The ash tray pulled from the oven glitters as if with sugar. I watched you encrust with technology, arm yourself against mouths, but fire strips us both to pure composition.
Our organics billow to ash.
Our minerals pat to char.
The heavier elements will glitter.
O burning bush burning
O burning bush burning
 
 
Does the notion of here include our parenthesis?
Holding your one program of belonging.
Do I belong [  ]?
 
 
From the highway asphalt, I watch you swarm the hill and over.
You have put yourself up against the sky.
Your naked back on the hill is the neat edge of sun at dusk!
I want this for my origin, your clarity of the world in two plain colors, an extremism of understanding.
But the coastal wind and you shiver with a millioned voice, like gulls in the shipping harbor not far from here, a voice mired with hungry necks and not a single voice.
Last night, you lined my sleep’s long throat and blurred.
On the sides of the highway, you turned into a sheathe, whitened by the headlights of a car.
You follow me like the moons of deviations around a mean.
You hold me like amber, my room in a house that was sold.