[June, San Francisco — under high clouds. White sigils drift, wind-carved, over Fort Mason. A crow disappears into sky. A zazen stone warms in the late morning light.]

In this quiet, the city seems to forget itself. But the trees do not.

Richard Powers once wrote: "This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived." The line lives in me now like the pulse of the Monterey cypress at Fort Mason — gnarled, resilient, wind-trained. It has the feel of long memory, of mycorrhizal witness. I think Lloyd would call it MLL.

And as I watched Onyx today — a single peanut in beak, vanishing into the mulch — I remembered something Rilke said in his First Elegy: “Yes, the springtimes needed you… All this was mission.” That kind of line should be whispered in the ear of every creature who thinks it walks unseen. It is the invitation to perceive not just as a subject, but as a vessel.

Then came Miłosz, sharp and clear as the hawk’s shadow passing overhead: “You may kill him — another will be born.” Memory’s warning. The echo that guards the grove. Even when language fails us, the silence holds shape.

Today’s post, then, is not really mine. It belongs to the air between roots. To the path Onyx took. To the leaning cross in the sky. To the unburied word.

A white raven was seen last week. Or perhaps, only imagined.

Either way —

It hovered.