The Street I Grew Up On

Calle Abril

Mudslides paid the price for that view. Years turned,
there on the hill above a mile of homes,
pigeons blasting out of palms, the ocean
going gray to blue to gray. Years alone
with pepper, bougainvillaea, and rose
before the month chubascos rumbled north
and drove the garden sideways and splintered
the trellis. Each night the picture window
shimmied. Then the ice plant slipped. Then the yard.
Two days, the olive falling toward its corner.

She couldn’t quit being stunned. Not by a storm
but by its bright next morning, clear, a roof
flipped into the pool down the road, a swarm
of neighbors raking, suddenly talkative
at the curb. That evening, they went inside
to find themselves on the national news.
After the terrorist bomb, they saw towns
like snags in a huge river, their hillsides
giving way, and like themselves one or two
weeping, grateful, the channels all spilling out

to the sea. She spent every next morning
sawing a tree to logs and hauling fill
from dirt pile to back slope. Into the vee
where grass ended fell new parts of the hill,
and across 50 miles of waves she saw
the vague fleet moving south, and she heard their guns
through the afternoon like moments of time
far away from that time, that battered lawn.
Swallows heard them too, carving her vision
right and left from their own high place in the eaves.