Escrow

ISSUE: Summer 2015

In every sale a list of ways your home
could be destroyed: flood, poison, earthquake, fire.
You must assert you have considered toxins,

understand the risks lodged in tectonic plates.
You may lodge downwind of breezes
off oil fields, refineries, or croplands.

Your world may end in fire or rain of golf balls.
Still, signing below this fine print allots you
your postcard plot of golden state.

Will the soil be cancerous? God willing not to you.
Your new house is younger than your mother.
No one can say what karma rules this place.

At your bottlebrush are native hummingbirds.
In your shed, provisions for the big one.
Above you the 200-year-old redwood waits.

In redwood years, this tree’s a baby.
It overlooks your fragile real estate.

Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Last West and Rift Zone, both from Red Hen. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies. She was a Fulbright scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has served as the poetry critic for All Things Considered for over a decade. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of California, Davis.