Wherever we go we look carefully.                   Range of Light, Muir called the Sierra Nevadas.                              And in the last hours of sun, we can see it: the lored Gold Mountain, luring                    Chinese men like M’s ancestors                               with the promise of Californian wealth. Our own faces, gilded for a breath.                  Then it blinks out, as all illusions do                               when conditions cease to be right.  We were most American                  in movement, most in range                               of that golden glow when  passing through. All I can say                 is I love these small white churches                               barely visible across the long fields. I roll down the car window                    to angle my voice against                               mountainsides as M and I turn hairpins  to toss our small mixed                   bodies into May-cold rivers:                               the American River, the Smith River,  whatever streams of snowmelt                  we can suffer. Once, our parents                               were verbs in the mouths of siren  cities, gateways to their parents’                  dreams: San Francisco, Los Angeles,                               Seattle, songs strung too quickly into codas.  Now the persistent pull                  to put them in our rearviews,                              this rugged-dust, gas-station-cigarette,  hand-me-down nation                   fitted like a crumpled fortune                              into our ungovernable forms.