I Am Made Of

I Am Made Of

I am made of the landscape
in northern California where I grew up,
made of my father's uninhabited mountain
where my twin sister and I spent
most of our time as small children
with the live oak trees, the stillness,
the tall grass, the dry smell
of the hot summer air
where the red-tailed hawks
turned slowly up high,
where the two of us alone at ten
did the spring roundup of my father's
twenty-six winter-shaggy horses.
Down below there were salmon in the stream
that ran by our house,
the life of that stream
and the sound of it
as we lay in our bunks at night,
our goat and the deer standing silently
outside in the mist
so many mornings when we awoke.

Linda Gregg

Posted as prose on Poets.Org
Line Breaks by Glenn Buttkus