Maya Khosla: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Maya Khosla
Three Poems
Mountain Lion, Lassen
Where the uneven hour moves loose as scree
underfoot, slipping with each sloping step,
the eyes glow green in a headlamp’s circle.
Here is the good work of a moment.
A predator’s curiosity crouching low,
having detected my missteps all along
from distances that gave away fragments
only slightly greater than the sotto voce
of air currents. Having watched
with the focus of a healthy appetite,
growing. Eyes meet, and all stops.
The sliding stones stop, slight willows
rustle. Each of us listens with every ounce
of body we own. Only a few meters
separate us. Only a few million years
gave one seniority and four legs
on a scale of time where the other,
with jacket and hair smelling of campfire
smoke and steam, arrived later,
more foolish, more closely related
to the all the generations who are
unwittingly melting Lassen and
other massifs, with warmth, zeal,
rooted in the union of innocence
and ruin. The senior one will bear
consequences without knowledge,
question, blame. Only hunger dictates.
For now, pre-dawn owns a language
devoid of words, held in the way
the pulse can quicken. Something
must surely give. Something dark
must back away, facing the glow.
Hope Pressing On, After Fire
Morning rain. The river turns into a blend of receiving
And rocky flow. Water falls through sky and leaves,
as hermit thrush notes rise, intensifying the low roar.
In the distance, another thrush, a male mountain quail
whistling. Now the whole forest, a house full of singing;
in wet corridors, floors of fungi and darkling beetles,
ceilings of oak leaves dripping. Shooting star buds
nodding under drops. Now the quails stop; a vixen
and her two pups are advancing toward water.
Grasses pressed by furred feet straighten up in soft snaps.
The softness of mycorrhizae bloom underfoot. Even after
the fire, cathedrals of burned forest are no less whole.
The pups bound clumsily, now tripping, now
righting themselves, watching their mother’s progress.
Arriving, where granite rock touches the cascade,
as it turns into a pool dimpled with rain, they drink
and shake themselves. One of the pups tugs the mother’s tail.
She nudges them toward the cover of ferns and low branches.
Hope carried in her watchful eyes and pace, heading back
to the warmth, the small and familiar warmth, of a burrow.
Lean Winter of the Lynx
One lynx kitten lay down in the snow. Clear brightness everywhere.
And dark trees. She was under a great spruce. Her paws were soft, the fur
on her head damp with melted snowflakes. It wasn’t snowing anymore.
She had raced for a sooty grouse, judging distances a priori, forelimbs inches
behind the bird. She learned its beating wings could enter air. That was where
the chase ended. The chance of survival, encrypted in cold. The thumping
stillness of air. The emptiness. She remembered the den where she was raised,
the cavernous interior, the wooden cave. Her first meal of snowshoe hare
brought in. The dampness around the ears, the neck bones fresh. The sound
of coyotes yipping, her mother’s low growl. Now there was no way to rise.
The brightness was everywhere, feeling how fast she had run after
the grouse. There was a darkness in her eyes, nothing she was ready
to understand. Perhaps there was a simpler way to go, perhaps she needed
sleep. The snow drift pressed in the shape of her body, like a good white bed.
Author Bio:
Maya Khosla is a biologist and writer with training as a toxicologist. She is documenting forests biodiversity and the impacts of extraction. As Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), she brought Sonoma’s communities together to heal through gatherings, field walks, and shared writing after the recent wildfires. Her books include “All the Fires of Wind and Light” (Sixteen Rivers Press), “Keel Bone” (Bear Star Press; Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize). Her recent awards include the 2023 Fund for Wild Nature Grassroots Activist Award, the 2020 Environmentalist of the Year Award (Sonoma County Conservation Council, SCCC), and the 2020 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Her work has been featured in For the Wild, and in the film Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire, and she has written for award-winning documentary films including “Village of Dust, City of Water,” about water crises in rural India.
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