Blueberries on Mars

Along the American River trail I slow
to a steady run under heavens
blue with summer sky and my spirit soars
into the vastness and I think of the Mars’ rover
at the landing site
that once was drenched with water.
        Suddenly I see her
out of the corner of my eye,
veer off in her direction through bramble
and oak, stop and startle a kestrel
about to plunge off a tree branch after an insect. 
I watch her, the young girl.  She is wearing
cutoff jeans and a white blouse
and kneeling on a flat rock near the river’s edge. 
Looks to be ten or eleven.  No, I remember. 
She is twelve and she is picking up small muddy
rocks and dipping them into the water
to make them smooth and glossy,
and she is crying.
        There is a quick flutter and I see
the rufous tail of the kestrel as he hits his target
and flies away.  I understand it’s the way
things are, but I feel sorry for the beetle. 
I know why the girl is crying and I know about
her parents who throw words around
like divorce and how she will grow up
acquainted with pain, how she will learn
that death and loss is everywhere lifelong,
thick like weeds, and how she will spend the rest
of her life looking for the in-between places:
the fragrance of sweet fennel rising
between patches of spikeweed.
        I let the sunlight slide over my body,
brush off scratchy purple sanicle, walk to where
I had seen her and pick up her glossy stones. 
She couldn’t have known then that all these
years later I would come here and value
what she saved for me,
        like in the ancient bedrock on Mars,
little caches of what scientists call “blueberries,”
concretions of spherical particles formed by water,                                   
hidden and waiting,
                proof of life on a dry dead planet.