Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana, and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.
Why these years the same six
or seven landscapes recurring
in sleep, dreams’ own geometry
arranging map where familiar
but unknown locations reappear,
unchanged like photographs still
alive in some darkroom’s red-lit
bath? A different Hanford, empty
1930s’ high school white locker
room before the game, phantom
packing house for fresh stone
fruit with fence and scale, steak
house, vast department store,
escalators and mezzanines . . .
Turn west on tangled road you
drive through vineyards until
knock at a blue door. Surprise,
grammar school buddy Lewis
King greets you, happy again
after fatal heart attack on way
to card game. From flat Valley
land unnoticed sandstone peaks
stand up one mile away, orange
at sunset, cast shadows leading
you to bare granite mountain first
visited in child’s deep slumber,
maybe above Tahoe. The hidden
neighborhood in Selma on a side
street, strange cliffs overlooking
new river, gorge below Reedley
a bamboo forest? In Colorado –
Boulder? – your rent is tending
nearby yards you must weed
and water but forget. Other
terrains and half-plots hinting
vague unease remain locked
symbols that won’t or can’t
reveal themselves, why I keep
arriving, as if sure this time I’ll
recognize the place and story.