Living by the Pacific

They don’t break: waves
are the gash oars make
in a stream,

like someone unzipping the sea,
then sand goes into soda
and the salts regroup,

but sometimes after a dozen it’s dull,
you check your cell,
driving home takes you elsewhere . . .

California’s so big you can’t see it.
Elsewhere, branch water rubs limestone
into pikes and funnels,

I hang off the continent’s cuff
thinking of a cavern’s painted bubble
I toured as a kid.  Waves burst, I buckle

for streams I didn’t think I wanted,
grieve at my lack of those doctors,
far from my home, full of water.

Tea

               fuckin hippies    -Anon.

The bitten silt, raw silk on the tongue,
uncuffs boring afternoons
and friends without cars or tables,
becomes meditation, it wanders.
I am my drinker’s keeper and get him
a cup, tea isn’t kept on islands.

What about it concentrates us
into a taproot?
Fresh metal hot, cure
for July when cooled, this parliament
of mushrooms prone to being drunk by people
in sunlight. It is like the fan blades
a sago raises, honed and old.

No one’s cup is new, they’re all footnotes
to a bush first men saw fit to drink of,
the water-conjured companion
once Asia’s, now a world tongue, plucked
and sunk to ripen the pulse
of daylight’s homely measures.

(2009-2012)

Canoe Quartet

I. Fishermen
We slingshot the bend
Spading bourbon-colored water

Our course a mix of drift and shoot
Through locust din, our six grey

Oars pushing low and full
Into the river’s brainless way.

Then from a sinkhole something
Crude and huge drags my line

And the snout of the last canoe
Strikes a pitted lip

Of understream limestone and two
Inches of water slosh in, soaking

Boots and tackle.  “The ship!  Great God where’s the ship?”
We cackle, and everyone grins.

II. Air Show
Come and go fishing
The weekend’s pleasures
Are slipping
The week’s tether

Cow-tongued summer laps
Us up.  “Y’all thick
As thieves, aintcha?” grinned the guy in the Coinjock
Baitstop, handing us our Pabst.

It’s good to be here
Above deep spots
Where the smallmouth plot
Their feeding leaps

It’s good here
Near sunset, slung in citrus filaments
Amateur sundowners
With a thing for summer

Thunder a ways off
Mumbles its gripes
And bank trees twist into types
Of somebody’s passion

And summer spreads its endless ending.

III. Sycamores
Above they rasp behind our backs
The flickering court
Explains some matter to itself
We try to listen in.

Just stuff–but they tune July’s smolder
Tune our inner weathers
To the rank mint of cut hay
We short-timers in country days

Who cast across the river’s flesh
And hook the scattered chords of wet
And dry, bank or bottom, reeling them
Into memory’s creel, where we lay our heads.

IV.  The Landing
Student arms
Strain the boats back up
Up the gravel bank, our dock tonight
Fiberglass gunwales knock

And in tenebris above the water
Within the ratty brush
Zips an angled, tailing hiss—
Someone opens a beer.
We’ll plant tents here

While water licks the bank
With water, licks water
Before mosquitoes pick our wrists
Before sleep drops in, unzips
His kit, and his trip begins

(2006)

Letter Home from Fire Season

At two p.m. the sun turned red
And then I begged on twilit blocks,
The TV in McDonalds said
Tractor sparks on a mountain ranch
Flushed fire down the canyons.

Smoke beards the wind
And the coastal range,
A hundred-thousand tons of burning
Bushes salt the towns,

Listen! Its dander stuns horseflies,
Blunts the palm’s green razors,
Makes throats tighten and rooms grow weird,

Leaves this rasp of ash along the curbs
Which the wings
Of sparrows panic into rings.

But the dark town doesn’t spook—
No flight, no riots, no visions,
Save here and there, some of us
Missing persons drunk to dust,

And officer, I would move on,
Ditch my box in the park,
But I enjoy this powdered quiet,
I like the fire at my throat,
And smoke, sir, smoke is a shaman’s summer coat.

(2007, published in the William & Mary Review, 2008)