I.Call it soft, our evacuation.The gallery is sealing up the irises,the sprinklers left on.Overhead the Pacificfalls in long white veilsand out of the smoke a raven lightsupon his cypresslike a wick in reverse.It’s autumn and our maps are yellowing.Our Tuscan crownsdescribe a wind Angelenos call deviland the Spanish a saint.(Here you may choose your syllablesby their dead.) Topanga.The Above Place or just Above.II.My hand bridges shores on the canyon wall,the bones of reef, mollusks like ossicleslistening in the rock                                                                        (no, be present).Visiting hours may be affected.Each year the old Colonials make wayfor mid-century steel and faux-marblereliefs, porticoes and rows of cypressmeant to make our Iowa by the Seaseem a touch more mediterranean.In a thousand years these constellationsof wild mustard or the eucalyptus,blue-grey as fog breaking over the coast,blue-gray as fingers, lips                                                                          (no, be present),or the cypress, will they be native then?The children are out hunting arrowheads,tongues of soapstone they strike like flint—a gameof war against the past or its presence,how it lies there in strata we call beds,listening to Firehawks roll back the wavesand refusing to speak, to play.III.How will I make a little home for us in time?A window in a white room looking on benigncarnations or a cypress raised from the Dead Sea?In Europe they’re considered cemetery trees,a different sort of property line, taper-thin,and solemn as those distant strains of violinthat lingered on the intercom. Your hands, her gloves,the nun whose throat Modigliani would have loved,the way she wiped the ventilator clean: I’ve triedto shut some details out. A memory baptizedor thinned like chaparral, like sage or last year’s fronds,a supplication to the weather we named godwhich brings fire, growth, and other symptoms of decline.How will I make a little home for us? In time.IV.topanga         where the summit takes the tidelisten and you can hear it         something sharpspills an ocean         from the ceremonyof the sky         and in my dreams the earth dragsa cypress down         to a pillar of ashsmoke eating lungs         into the dead mountainor smoke eating         into the mountain’s lungswe too darken where we stand         we too breathethe movement out of stars         (heat has its costs)like a black feather         against a child’s palmlike a single word of light         redactedyour warmth         kept captive on a line of gaswe too         are horizons in the makingand when they rolled you god         the fire mapV.It’s early, for a century,so name your savior: Christ or controlled burns,coyotes on the switchbacks shaking ghosts from their fur orjust ash. This sweetgum’s seeda sun-skin warming in my palm.Show me a life sustainable: the raven or his cypress,the Irises of J. Paul Getty priceless,and fading safety under marble and alarmor branches crossing fingers with the power lines.The fire, too, passesand light, conceived in absence,will burn cold after cold redeems the last flame.Today in hospice someone chose the hour, the wine.The children peeling off their names.