Rini Cromsight, who lived out his life in the Santa Clarita valley and could hit my best pitch a ton, who drank only bud, "because it's American", drove his car into a wall at a hundred and ten.
Harold, the old guy across the street who looked a little like John Carradine, whose two hundred and thirty pound son led African safaris, died yesterday, lymphatic cancer flowering inside him.
My grandmother died when I was twelve and I still can't see her face in my mind, although there is some kind of brown blurry outline, limp in a wheelchair, not knowing what day it was, never knowing who I was...
When I was fourteen and ran along the riverbed behind my house I could see the coming years scattered like words on the smooth stones, under enormous nights...
Nights full of African hands, nights as silent as the inside of bone, nights I would reach down deep in my pockets trying to find something familiar...
I have seen the day when my parents will die and I will scatter their ash among the rocks and sea of Whalehead point and their hands will move back and forth with the waves like clumps of kelp.
The dead stand, each on the others shoulders, fifty deep in the earth. Sometimes at night, when the darkness lies like a shroud on the trees, we feel the dead's hands on top of our feet.
When the wind stops riffling its dark wings across the Angeles crest, we hear voices, a humming like blue dragonflies...
A whisper from the other side...
Rise and be whole.
And walk in our dreams.
And speak through our mouths.
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