and storms
carve the heaviest spaces of earth.
Rock shifts, sanddrifts mound or cave into
new rock pools, sea anemones open and close,
all life undulates fragility.
You find unfastened a purple-red starfish
washing in the tidal slip and lift it up for me.
Ink-red patterns in relief on its spiny back,
hieroglyphs, ancient inscriptions I decipher—lambda, lambda, lambda—
strings of Greek syllables I would sing for you
in an optative mood.
3
I have not loved you in all seasons, only this one,
summer turning gold into autumn
and the California coast stretches long as usual in a mist,
longer in a bright day like this one, water unfurling
like silk along chalk cliffs, sky and sea lapis,
a white edge curled farther North like fur.
Every line in the landscape is hard with clarity
and whatever this is
is hard with clarity.
Teach me. Tell me. I am listening
like a morning bird of the marshes
hidden among dry brown grasses.
You cannot see me loving you.
4
Several miles up San Gregorio Road
the strawberry man can’t read your T-shirt:
Fly fishing on the Rogue, you say.
Wild fishing, he says.
He counts coins in your hand,
his own hands small, root-gnarled, pig-knuckled.
We exchange looks as we walk
from the tin shed into
blue-big sky. Your hands dribble water from a green bottle
to clean the berries.
He’s watching us,
a scruple in his eye, a baffled or knowing
wonderment. I can’t say which.
By the sea again, heading south toward Pescadero,
I pass you a large red bead of a berry by the stem.
Stem and all, all at once
you take it in your mouth
from my fingers. I don’t know if I know what I mean
or if you do.
In a fog of yellow dust, I see again
the farm-grimed fingers of the knot-tight little man who,
from the grease-black engine of his truck,
looked up and touched
the tip of his hat.
5
I’m being silly on our walk up the beach.
A dry stalk of kelp my baseball bat, and here’s a baseball,
one flap undone, wet and wobbly in white air,
and a light bulb from a yacht offshore brassy in my mouth.
You take a photograph of me, with bulb, with ball, with bat,
ready to strike. Me on the beach at Pescadero,
I’m throwing the ball up for your photograph
to remember me.
6
I kneel by a tidal pool to unfasten a starfish,
points curled round the ragged end of black rock.
I claw at its edges. Water ripples light
around my cold fingers, prying the starfish,
Nothing loosens. The nail rips.
I suck thin blood clean from the wound
and see the starfish in my watery shadow,
its purple-red like the purple-red of our starfish,
but alive with a wild tenacity. It won’t let go
and will not float like the dead into my hand.
We will come again, you say, to Pescadero
and colors of the sea will be different,
new animals in old rock pools, seawinds pushing our hair.
Something like knowledge washes over us like a wave.
The Whale
Somewhere out there you are walking; maybe you’ve gotten
as far as the beach and taken off your shoes or pulled
binoculars from your pack to see a bird better, or a boat,
or the island of seals. And you’ve wondered by now, as I do,
will they be there forever, the beach, the birds, the seals,
figures, you among them, dear friend, of this landscape
I see from my window, a frame on a changeable weather,
everything, not just the tide, in flux, faraway but soon.
And what if you’ve paddled your kayak into big winds
beyond easy waves of the harbor? What if you’ve taken on
sea chop, its wild unknowable currents and swells?
A whale cruising for krill might graze your hull,
tip it. What I honor is your brave imagination, not that
you
