Weekly Poem: 'Our Valley'

**By Philip Levine** We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.   "Philip Levine":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4055 is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently "News of the World" (2009). Other collections include "Breath" (2004); "The Simple Truth" (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and "What Work Is" (1991), which won the National Book Award. The poem above, "Our Valley," originally appeared in the "November 2008 issue":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/toc.html?issue=1138 of Poetry. Coming soon on the PBS NewsHour is a profile of Levine, who talked to Jeffrey Brown.