Kalmiopsis by Luke Brandy

by Luke Brandy

Why she just shudders in her heaved-out slough tread of willingness, her old sketch trace wrinkle trails had healed up into round soft scars so we kiss her tender spots with crew-strength boots, tearing stunted withered shrubs, scraping smooth our raw passage into her, churning bleached peridotite, shattered silt plates, and drench peat fern glades, we pretty her up, you see, the metallic ping and deep resonating resin-stained repetitive thud of ceremonially honed flickering silver grin sharp edged tools, used by us to reinvigorate my dear sweet ripe dry-eyed sour tick bit shamelessly coarse old coastal broad, Kalmiopsis, shoved up as she is into the scattered burrs on the lips of battered canyons, littered with bony snags like snubbed out cigarettes, she’s just thrust against the bursting tumors of caustic serpentine, parched right now, but she anticipates the imminent wet torrents of molasses-colored piss and wrung out festering bandanas.

Her depth though, her persistence is almost totally immune to the most erosive intentions, yet even now it is penetrated by fresh enthusiastic seedlings with throbbing veins of tang sap, a brittle embrace of thirsting probing cambium, but Kalmiopsis takes everything we’ve dumped upon her, the stretch marks of old firelines, the blackened eyes of abandoned mines, she takes it into her deep springs of watery still coolness, that gurgling murmur in the mossy folds and she finds a serene balance with the chromium edges, that seared nose sharpness, slick with burst blisters of poison oak, she just looks up, staring straight into the perilously bright sun and she absorbs and assimilates the sum total of my furious unhinged aggression, Pulaskied berserkery, the choke shoveled manic assaults, erupting from me, the cracked finger blown boot heel Bolander bully, the belt buckley lover of lost causes, ever hopeful and nostalgic, romantically pursuing that alleged end of a dozer road, to find her virgin folds on some forgotten strip of snake egg hardscrabble cobble toss, to find my dear beloved Kalmiopsis country girl astride an old mangy mule named Chetco, teal-eyed newt-hued Chetco, leading the way to the fertile easy salty lowlands below, ridden by the toughest wilderness princess, a remorselessly ultramafic and unapologetic old woman, washed away.

Kalmiopsis.