Selected Poems

from Daily Horoscope

• The Burning Ladder
• California Hills in August
• The Country Wife
• Insomnia
• Sunday Night in Santa Rosa

from The Gods of Winter

• Money
• The Next Poem
• Planting a Sequoia
• Prayer
• Rough Country

from Interrogations at Noon

• The Litany
• The Lost Garden
• Summer Storm
• Unsaid
• Words

California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

from Daily Horoscope
© 1986 Dana Gioia