Signal Hill

i

What do the pine trees
on the hill's long back whisper?

I hear them say "Listen, listen,
the wind in off the endless sea
peaks in our long green leaves.
Sunlight gets thin as the clouds
move in over the sun. Listen.

Deep roots walk among stone and sand,
but always still, only the growing point
moving forward for water. The wind
bears us salt and rain, and hard bark
creaks old in its handless embrace."

They speak of sunlight and water,
air and water, light and earth.
Roots that move only
at the growing point,

make themselves as wood and leaf
and cone and seed.
And seed makes trees of air and water,
soil and light.

ii

Below the cold front greys the waves;
Cloud moves in from the northern sea:
The language of a breakering pavane
too far to hear, below the breath of wind
in the low scrub and the far roar of machines, listen.

The voiceless sound the wind and water make
up and down, up and down in a swelling breath.
Only the deep currents move, but the wave
is a sequence of trough and crest, illusion
of moving, swell and pitch, down and up.

iii

From up here everything looks small.
Buildings are rubble, trucks and machines
are unheard notes in the city's chord
and the wind in the pines is everything.
It's easy to forget how all below
is full of people, smaller than the doll
of oneself in someone else's eye, smaller
than sand. A handful of this city would

run with human pain. We've built
a factory of stars and death down there.
It's easy to forget how we
are unlike tree and wave and light.

Having, in short, invented time
and languages to bind it in
we tell the story of our lives
and where that story ends we change
life's language with a speaking mind:

Process and future, property and theft
Pain and pain and others' pain
shoring us up against return
to tree and wave, and certain death.

The peoples' country is so mean:
the land of spiders eats more meat
than all our cities in a year,
the land of whales thinks more deep.

And the pines whisper, "Sunlight and water,
Air and water, light and earth.
Listen. The wind here is everything."