It's the vertigo that makes you kneel.

Pulled over on the PCH to watch the sun dip into the pacific. In the haze and vaporous distortion coming off the ocean at the horizon, it doesn't look like the sun passes behind the waters so much as dissolves into them. Ten minutes later I'm on winding Skyline Boulevard in the failing light, peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains before me in the palest oranges against a blue sky rapidly washing of its color. Then darkness. Windswept pine trunks in my headlamps. To the left, when snaking past a crest, the sweep of silicon valley's low rise architecture, spidery orange lines of sodium vapor street lights densely layered between the mountainside and the bay, what would be stars circling and queueing and landing at sfo. To the right, breaks in the trees open up vast swaths of black nothing that can only be the pacific, the sand, the stars too dim for my slow retinas to see. Were it not for the engines bass line, the rumble of rubber rolling over asphalt, could I hear the waves breaking on the cliffs so far below? Probably not.

Eating garlic fries and a tri-tip, sipping root beer in what turns out to be the alice's restaurant and no mere reference. It feels like the logging country this all once was, sweeping vistas hiding behind the old growth and the folds of the mountain. The staff all eating their shift meals on the counter next to me, long day ending in a quiet sunday night and nearly time to punch the clock and go home. And what am I doing here, this notebook and pen sitting next to my root beer, head swimming with the scent of the forest and memories of rocky cliffs dropping into oceans lit with the evening sun, stripped bare and quivering before the force of the landscape, dumb and overwhelmed. There is no home for you here, what you love razing you even as you loose yourself inside it.

Pulsar Beacon Haiku

Heartbeats, coming regularly
as beans come in the pod -
that other pulse.