I call this home: between the handrails
of Sierra and Coast Range, where
they're mowing rice fields with big
yellow harvesters. Gravid pumpkins
and honeydew melons lie in the next field,
blossoms long-gone. A red carpet
of naked tomatoes on bare dirt
extends a quarter section, beckoning.
The road rises above an ocean of heavy
rice stalks. The air, thick and dusty,
smells like feet and neglected
refrigerator shelves; nowhere I've ever
been has this air. In the car as a kid,
I watched Sandhill cranes
light on flooded rice paddies;
thought rice was harvested by shearing
the top off each grassy stalk and drying
tiny clippings into the hard grain I recognized.
We never stopped the car to see how rice
grew, to examine the shape a pumpkin
leaves in dirt, to smell the navels
of a hundred melons in a windy field.
Driving, I wonder how this valley looked before
it was planted. Where did cranes land?
I arrive at Sten and Kathleen's
farmhouse to find him shaping fresh rice
fronds into a bouquet for her. He stopped to pick
them from the fields I drove; now I finger
and eat a few pendulous kernels hanging
from long blades. We're on our way to a wedding
where we'll dance in an old oak grove planted
as a garden, and I'll catch Catie's satin-bundled
roses; each stem holding the possibility of something new.