Sacramento Valley, August

by Taylor Graham

Everything’s a map to get-away.
A/C = 4 rolled down at 70 mph w/o a Delta breeze.
Freeway to arterial to cutoff to the mouth
of some tributary valley, up ladders of streambed
rock, meandering between willow and oak
remembering how it ran in winter spate – dry now
like all the little valleys emptied into this
great basin, too broad to see hills on the other
side. Ridges, canyons – figments of flatland haze.
All the map shows down here are roads
going somewhere  – not wayward paths of memory.
Like salmon, I recite the way in my blood,
tracing back to beginnings, a valley where I live.