| Salinas
Buses arrive in the Valley of the Sun King dealing out Spanish paragraphs on tongues of duty, dappled with light and a feeling of the earth unwormed in dampness, reeling from the past, but open to the epilogue of new and late planting, of jugs unsealing. Scallions bloom, smearing the day with their pregnant smell and no sound; watermelons belch so sweet, their pulp simmering in balls so round around they roll with the kick of a foot and speak themselves ready to spit their seed if left just one more summery shower in the ground. Artichokes organize; their rows are neat, their hides, appropriately forbidding; they brim a love of continuity, their good hearts beating to the avocado's drum, it's green when done unlike the unrouged peppers, just begun-- stragglers of the season, seasoning some. All day the pickers move, bent this way in the U of their existing, in the songs of May that penetrate the furrows, tingle the roots of sustaining, the Santo way, the animal, vegetable the sky and sway, the land gives, except when it doesn't, Al Rocheleau |