The heat is triple digits even 
in California’s coastal oak 
forest—I’ve finished mile two of
five, as sweat-salt doilies my shoulders. 

Ahead lay “The Sisters”—four immense  
bay laurel trees that inadvertently
have built this trail-nook. Sisters who have 
gathered and smoothed local air as
if they were pulling taut the sheets
of an unmade sky, leaving nothing 
but odors of oregano, thyme, 
and lavender—a balm for my 
heaving lungs.  

I grin, as the gauze of brown air 
disappears—a reverse Big Bang—bad
air now collapsing into a thimble-sized,
avoidable mass. 
 
Passing the Sisters, I admire the work
they’ve done for these last ninety-eight 
years.

Soothing all—they ask for so little
in return.
                        

Six miles daily, half run, half walk.
Podcast-miles fill my ears—personal 
change and poetry, then the four-way 
at Highland and Catawba, where 
Bluetooth lives vanish—the way an
overheated sun suddenly ducks
below world’s edge on August 28th.

A dead spot, 

that pulls up my ghosts like fog fingers 
extending, 7:46 on a late summer morning, 
they double tap the dead spot in my heart, 
left by a Dad who provisioned nothing 
but a name. This discomfort, variable 
and diffuse, possible necrotic tissue— 
maybe ventricle, maybe left atrium, 
can’t really tell. 

Four times, endurance and the endless
sugar of magnolia blossoms helped 
me bypass the township sign Sadness, 
Population 72,873,628.

My daughters, neuroscientist, and 
surgical vet, palpate no dead
tissue, insisting the CAT-scan 
fuzz-ball is an artifact. 

Still, I see the township sign shimming
just above hot blacktop, maybe there, 
maybe not.