Valley Oak
I love what my mother cannot
love, gray dust, fruitlike
letters. I love your horribles,
too, the checkerboard grasses, all
my life I wished to be cooked
on the steely patio beside weedy
rosemary. I saw California, a low
red thing, and my fear inside
like a piece of yeast. Evenings
I drank sour beer on pine
slats built smartly to
jut from the house
throwing anchor long past
the edge of anything calendrical.
I laid the stems of letters
across wet pages. Does it
sit right at the hip? Is it
in key? Is it
mimetic? Is it
lacy or sparking?
Is it speaking?
I might have packed it all
up, a beginning, an edge, a
rim, a rime, a shine.
It shone in her mind. Music
is just a job.
Copyright © 2023 by Julia Bloch. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was born in Minnesota but spent most of my childhood in California’s Central Valley, a region of big agriculture, oil drilling, and real estate sprawl—but also a landscape of beautiful small details, like the rosemary that sprawled untended across our backyard. The valley oak tree, endemic to California and common in my hometown, is described by arborists as ‘messy but beautiful.’ I wanted to see how a poem might stir up some messy details about life and language through the oak’s canopy.”
—Julia Bloch
Julia Bloch
