At a Wine Tasting in Guerneville

, just next to a mid-century bungalow hidden
away from the curious cows and encroaching crops of rival vineyards,
an ancient Saluki snores in a sunbeam.

This is where my teacher tells me about microclimates,
the oases of shine or rain pockmarking the pervasive pallor of the Sonoma Coast.
Bored with her instruction and her foray into tannins,
I think up a whole world ensconced within another:
My hand inside my other hand, you know, church/steeple;
The Kingdom of Lesotho, all snug inside South Africa;
The pit in the fruit.

I think my life’s a document. Yesterday I walked
between the world’s oldest redwoods like it was nothing,
and the day before I sucked down fat raw oysters engorged with sea salt
and sprinkled with the juice of a lemon.
So today, what am I. Prince of grapes. Student of soil.

When I get up from my rocking chair, I’m dizzy;
I forget that even the purest pinot,
sans body, sans taste, sans everything,
Might yet produce something in me.
The kind of thing that engenders truth or some version of it. 

Some people say they watch their lives like movies,
Or even lucid dream, at will. They
hover, Turkey-Vulture, over
themselves from thirty thousand feet.
Now, there is a film between me
And the field of my whole vision.

Before I fall to the ground, my teacher, that grizzled vintner,
Catches the soft of my hand, even though I’d only
Be falling on the kindness of the fescue grass.
She’s stronger than she looks, so I give her the
Satisfaction of saving me.

My stomach betrays itself. My throat is a dinghy.
What’s it like to trip
on holy land? Before, she’d told me
We were smack in the middle of where all the Italians
had settled. Now this area is all chardonnay tours
for Brooklynites and Catholic kitsch and
family-style dinners for no one.

“Ah, so I’m on familiar ground,” I’d said. “The land of my people!”

Tomorrow, as I cradle
my head next to the poppies on Jenner Headway,
and listen to faraway moos as the heifers mourn over a
waterlogged carcass of one of their own, I’ll regret
saying that. No idea why.