 I'm going to start with this because it's Doug's poem. Artichokes and Jade Bones. We run along the coast. Our kid feet still wet with willingness. We run alongside the staccato rails that vanish and appear in tufts of indigenous shrubs and stands of weed eucalyptus. We are strawberry and we are artichoke. We chase flotillas of brown pelican and dance to our own childhoods of beach and driftwood. We weren't replanted here, but born in this strange colonial place. So surface patchwork, but the Jade Bones show the tossed stone chewed to cheese by olive muscles. It's a generous place. It's sometimes sleepy. And this fog sings some old songs, too. Up till about a year and a half ago, I used to tell people if they weren't applauding that I sulk if I don't. You'd better clap if you mean to because otherwise I sulk. And at this point, I'm just like, am I right if you don't? I do this to me as myself now. This is called Watershed. And it was written for a Watershed Poetry Festival. Village sites still sing, resonate through hidden shell mounds from every watershed that wrap these hills on thick-air nights like this one. Songs throb through the sidewalks, through the bark of bay trees in the ache of full bloom. And every angled slab of rock peering through the hillsides around Rocky Point and Glen Park Canyon, they remember their true names and call them out like birds do, announcing boundaries. Unseen, but heard if listened for, there is still joy in these hillsides. The water still runs here. Like groan. Let's go. Dance a fall invocation into the beach sand just where the cliffs and their attendant rocks provide punctuation. Let's dance until we are dusted like spice drops and the salt stings on our skin. Let's dance the butterfly migration, the Tay Berries along this marvelling coast, and then dance the spaces in between. Fantastic things dance. Every hug and oregano plant and sun-warmed wood deck with a periodic condor overhead. Let's dance fiercely like the grown women we are. Celebration, arts of destruction. They built new temples on the footprints of the old, on the water systems they didn't understand from the stones of grander buildings until they crumbled themselves or wandered off to pillage something else. In this light, the swings at the playground in the park, the playhouses at the zoo, the old pool by the beach, I can see them all, can taste waffle dogs, the hot of beach sand in the 60s. On days like this, I pull my quilt of sidewalk squares around me. This one's called Hey John, and it's for John Trudell. Look at them play love like a word-fined game. Play politics, and there along the creek the people are talking story and patterns and rhythms with the water who is trying her best to love us. John, it's raining again in San Francisco. The clouds come close, come in, and we're talking about islands in the bay. Online, they're selling a treasure map, and the people are whispering love to the small rocks and scattering them on the beach. One morning can change everything, John. One morning of press and fret, song and threat, I can hear you from here. I can hear you from then. If I sit on the porch, you know the way. There's an extra plate, one way and another. People are here to make sure other people are getting fed. This one is actually for Dove, Pete. Some of you knew him. We had a standing breakfast date every Sunday, and we did it for years. I mean, it may have been a decade. But he had MS, and eventually he died of not being able to breathe at all. Who will help renew the spells now? Weeks were when life was a dance with steps, a beat you could hang a hat on, limits that would hold, rainwater burning coals with equal reverence, a counted number of prayers, and the birds live in the tree up the hill. They're talking to me, sitting on the roof to open peanut shells as the weather shift comes on a chill wind. It would have been a good Sunday to walk. This one's called The Safety of Streets. If you fell as rain on this hillside, squirrels might eat you as plum petals. They fall, cupped like small palms at the foot of Diamond Street. The eucalyptus might make seed pods out of you, groan in the shadow of whimsy and rescue finches, the sound of model railway in your ears, two hills over. You might just catch Mary's poems in your web of linked oxygen and hydrogen. You might know the streets of Norton and Bummer. We are grown too serious. The man read a poem about the safety of the 1800s when my skin might have been sold to the state for a bounty to find safe. Sing me a song of rainwater in supermarkets. Sing me a song of rain in neighborhood. Fall with me like rain. So in spite of the fact that I've been writing all of these poems about a statue I don't like, it's day 35 of statue poems. And although I do kind of try to pretend I'm an incredibly grumpy person some of the time, mostly what I write about is weather and plants and water. And this is no exception. This is another weather, plants and water poem. It's called Over the Roots. Up the hill a raven flying into the fog, flying west into the backlit fog, wind coming in over the roots of San Francisco and San Mateo Railway. Over the roots, raven wings, Pacific fog coming in towards the bay here, between the hills and among the hills where the land snugs down, where the land crouches down, raven wings facing the afternoon sun. This one's for my maternal grandmother. It's called Standing in the Dark by the Backdoor Window. There are days when I wear you more surely than the handed-down strands of coral stolen when I was still a child. And the visions get clearer in these small days. The butterflies have made it up this far. I tell you, the rain brought you out this morning. As we approach your birthday, it would have been 98 of them. I found another box of your treasures in the closet as if every shovel full of exploration finds more of you and they've strung the holiday lights again. We'll look out the kitchen window tonight. We'll look at what used to be your city. I think I want to end with this. Such a thing as rebuilding. This is the fourth morning the ravens have joined me at dawn. Added their quiet mumbles to my quieter singing. Soft sweater echoes, the new red in the east and feathers reflect everything. And maybe these are the obsidian shards were meant to bury to lead the dead home. Either way, they leave them for me under the lichen-ridden plum trees between bricks slumped from the O6 fire, yes. There is such a thing as rebuilding and under the roots just hear the arroyo ran to the mission. Wrap the sling cord around the crown of your hat and sit here with me and the birds. They say rain on Saturday. We can wait together. Thank you.