The sun never came out that day on Mount San Jacinto.
We drove up in buses to hike around in fog, our teachers 
taking a break from teaching so we could run free. 
Greg was a magnet for us. We didn’t know why, 
but where he was, we needed to be. Tall, seeming older 
than the rest —Adam’s apple, shadowed upper lip — 
he must have known some things that we needed to learn. 
We followed him down trails, behind boulders, everywhere 
losing him to the scarves of fog that curled around tree trunks 
and filled hollows. What was this ache I felt, this pleasant 
lump in my throat, this poignant longing? It wasn’t the boy 
exactly, or the fog, but somehow the fog and the boy together, 
the fog and the boy and the mountain, the fog, the boy, 
the mountain and the trees all dark and wet and shadowy 
like the future drawing me in to its mysteries, the past 
behind me a sunny path I would never walk again.
                        

My mind is full of Latin declensions,
the Norman Invasion, the poems
of John Donne. It’s April, the air
sweet with citrus blossom. At breakfast 

Dad asks, Will I help him hoe weeds?
This was always an honor for a male visitor,
not a daughter! It was man’s work;
I never gave it a thought. It was my father 

come in from the field, wiping sweat, 
my brother’s boots tracking sand 
in the entry way. But Dad is mild now,
no more the scary hulk of my childhood.

We walk the sandy rows together, 
wielding hoes, whacking. He shows me 
how the blossom grows, how the petals drop, 
how the green nub at the heart swells 

into a lemon, an orange, a Dancy tangerine. 
All the years I grew there I never 
gave it a thought; it was magic I took
for granted like the daily sunrise, the wind 

that rose from nothing, the alchemy 
that can turn a beast of a man 
into a gentle purveyor of knowledge.