Robert Graves wrote about the Holy Spirit being figured
as feminine in different traditions,
and somewhere in Genesis it said that the Holy Spirit moved
upon the face of the waters and is connected to the Virgin
Mary, and Robert Graves connects her to various virgin entities.
So that's through some of these poems,
and there are also lists of cities
that come from the archive of lynchings in California.
"My Daughter In From Shore."
Cement pipe cover painted blue, shattered peels of blue paint
in the grass.
The hills seem quiet forever.
Add a meter to the mountain, turtle choke on her plastic,
turkeys are free, two horses touch muzzles across a fence.
Middle school dance dark, thick around them, around us.
A shoulder remembers itself from its impressions.
In the archive, grass, then air, then Coloma, then unspecified,
then us.
Sweat, straw smell, heavy stage curtains.
Not what was said, in the nose or the good foot.
Everything is leaving.
Upon the face of the waters, she's a fish basket.
When cocked with sedge, caddisflies, sweet flag.
A winnowing sieve when on land.