The volcano sang and coughed.

        ***

A Yahi woman held this basalt mortar,
its mano-stone now gone.

She carried the palm-sized rock from camp to camp
beyond windy foothills

along the muscled muddy legs
of Deer Creek, Mill Creek, Dye Creek,

pounded in it the fruit of valley oaks and purple needlegrass,

oiling the stone's eye dark.

        ***

Discarded Chinese railworkers gathered
the scattered fists from fields,

banked them into shoals waist-high,
eddied mortars, pestles, axe-heads into walls

at fifteen cents for sixteen feet.

        ***

A depression,
smooth with fine rock dust,

empties my basalt ribcage; I have a half-
sister whose solid, patinaed hand I used to hold

to my chest, whose name I've forgotten.

        ***

The hills' arms grope to gather us all:
seedheads, water, rubble

the mortar I've become, the pestle I seek.
From the lichen-clad walls, Mama's old voice--

her songs grainy with lost children--rolls.