Keith Dodson, Aged Window Panes, 2020
Digital photograph
Courtesy of the artist
Across my hometown’s hills
standing-lamp Craftsmans
form siloed estuaries.
It’s said that the Family
lurked these streets,
stalking their next prey, but Charlie
didn’t dig it. Still it’s easy
to fear the changeling,
longhaired nights of August, winds scented
with the arroyo’s alkaline dirt,
metallic and lonesome
as a daily-sharpened knife. I spent
my adolescence braiding
broken curfews, driving home late
on oak-shadowed streets, afraid
of nothing and hitting
only green lights. I hike
the South Pas water tower,
intruded on by silhouettes
scratched like lotto tickets:
I was the timid boy
blamed for drawing
the deputy’s flashlight —
five of us prone, shirtless, stoned,
noses buried in the gravel
mulberry-stained by pesticide.
White and killing time
we got let go with a smirk,
sewn with adrenaline
that calcified my arms.
This morning it’s clear
as my record, a Santa Barbara
postcard. Sloped ranch houses’
Ring Apps watch, drilled
into stucco. Inside, calmed
by plaid pajamas,
my neighbors are the bright sides
of themselves, survivors
of another witching hour
with the odd mercy of a killer
softened by framed baby pictures.
I wait for views like this,
authorized by rainfall,
clearing a sun-clean panorama
never promised but for California’s
defense mechanism of beauty.
And on slow nights my heart
balks when the driveway light flashes,
snagged on the skipping shadow
of the mother coyote
carrying a half-eaten cat.