Woman, Gathering

       The south wind
       moves through groves of oaks and sycamores;
       the valley shifts vicissitudes,
       grinding time like acorns.
       A Maidu woman, glinting through
       the distance of 2000 years,
       swishes a seed beater
       like a jai alai basket and pauses,
       raising her arm to shield her eyes

       as she watches a flock of dark-eyed juncos,
       scattering for seeds,
       scrambling that quantum instant
       between us
       when we both look out
       past basaltic flows,
       ancient alluvial deposits,
       and across the valley,
       its rivers nurturing,
       feeding us each
       our distant destinies.

Nancy Wahl attended UC Berkeley and CSU, Sacramento; she was awarded the First Place 2000 Award for poetry by Literature Alive, the First Place 1998 Bazzanella Literary Award, Poetry, and the 1999 Bazzanella Award,
Fiction, and her work has appeared in the Suisun Valley Review, Tule Review, Poetry Now, Healing Voices and the Sacramento Anthology: One Hundred Poems.
"Either she knows all this stuff, or she purloins whole libraries of dictionaries; and it doesn't really matter, since the object of this poetry is to play, a lighter and more lyric play, just as Ingalls' is a deeper philosophic play.
But there are serious notes, as when Wahl's speaker notes the pleasure she enjoys and the disturbances she knows she fends off..." Tom Goff, Poetry Now
"Nancy Wahl's narratives are speculative and rich with allusions ... lit from within like the title poem's Pony Fish." ... Dennis Schmitz
"Nancy Wahl's poems combine, in a magical way, the intellectual, sensual, spiritual and psychological experience." Norine Radaikin