Consider Kissinger:
the honorary Globetrotter
of Harlem who spins on fingertip
the world as balloon, the buffoon
erected and be-plaqued here
by the Rotary Club as evergreen
and in this Peace Grove planted
alongside Waldheim and Nixon,
Bush, Herbert Walker and Mother Theresa,
one Pope, one Dalai Lama, one Doctor
King; Kissinger who was the one
the bunnies in Hugh’s mansion voted
MILF and is named here in our great tradition
of naming, as on the Anza expedition
the conquistadors dropped
armored mission after armored mission after saints—
Obispo, Francisco, etc.—up this Western coast my lover
and myself now, by cleared path, regard,
hardly touching
each other or the invasive grasses
the conquistadors also brought perhaps
by bootsole, perhaps by taste as we like
to do: to tote and plant and raze a home
we can recognize, even when we want anew, we two
invaders who love to recognize each other by shoulderstoop,
by tone behind closed door or down
beyond the trail bend, and so the grasses
are Mediterranean, as were the Spanish
and what was before their former windows, as is vista
point, which is where we are asked to stand
to see before us land
unnamed, and imagine ourselves, we twin Adams,
as the didactics at the trailhead suggest, witnessing the native
flora that, before Eucalpytus and other
pacification, flourished
here, didactics that provide a painted rendition
of the lands, wildflowered and alive, before the Spanish came
and we came behind them and there is not
a one
in the painting—not a bowl or blanket,
not a toe or term of endearment, not a mother,
not a swimmer in the painted pre-Spanish San Pablo
Creek, though there are realistic
salmon. There is nothing
that has nothing to do with this.
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