Dana Gioia

Official site for poet and critic Dana Gioia

  • News & Interviews
  • Bio
  • Poems
  • Books
    • Poetry
    • Criticism
    • Anthologies
    • Libretti and Recordings
    • Translations
  • Videos
  • Essays
    • On Writers
    • Literary California
    • On Poetry
    • Music & Film
    • Memoir
    • Writing & Reading
  • Opera & Music
You are here: Home / Poems / Daily Horoscope / California Hills in August

California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

Filed Under: Daily Horoscope, Poems