Sea Lion at Dog Beach

Sea Lion At Dog Beach

The dogs find the body first,
fin over teakettle tumbled by surf
up the tide line onto the beach
of kelp-strewn sand, pale meat
where seafaring creatures
chewed at the drowned hide,
nothing remains of the head, no eyes,
fins limp & folded, backwash
lifts & swirls the shrinking corpse
away from the nuzzling dogs,
their owners’ shouts, bathers gawking
beside, so close, so raw.

W S Merwin

W S Merwin

The Present

As they were leaving the garden
one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

I am to give you this
as you are leaving the garden

I do not know what it is
or what it is for
what you will do with it

you will not be able to keep it
but you will not be able

to keep anything
yet they both reached at once

for the present
and when their hands met

they laughed

Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson

During Rain
by Charles Tomlinson

Between
slats of the garden
bench, and strung
to their undersides
ride clinging
raindrops, white
with transmitted
light as the bench
with paint: ranged
irregularly
seven staves of them
shine out
against the space
behind: untroubled
by the least breeze they
seem not to move
but one
by one as if
suddenly ripening
tug themselves free
and splash
down to be
replaced by an identical
and instant twin:
the longer you
look at it
the stillness proves
one flow unbroken
of new, false pearls,
dropped seeds of now
becoming then.

Harry Humes

Harry Humes

from The Bottomland:

Vultures

by Harry Humes

Three we found sheathed in ice

after a late freezing rain.

They were like glittering bottles

stuck on a branch,

their small eyes watching,

eyes that could see

rabbit guts half a mile away.

We lowered them in a sling

and carried them like logs to the shed.

Our daughter traced a finger

over the red turkey heads.

She lay next to them.

They were longer by inches.

Suddenly a horny leg broke through,

a shoulder, some wing feathers,

and then the stench of their true

design drove us away.

We left the shed door open and watched

from the kitchen as they wobbled out,

fussing their feathers, stretching their wings,

bouncing grotesquely, then rising easily,

beautifully, the world’s real

pragmatists using the slightest updraft,

scanning the landscape, scouring it.

Their whole being was set for this

Puritan hatred of living flesh,
this love of neatness.

Adam Fell

Adam Fell

from I Am Not a Pioneer:

Limbo

by Adam Fell

Light falling on snow

is naturally cast upward,

but we are not designed

to fully contain the glow.

We wake in the dark of the woods

and must go forward.

When we are killed, we respawn

a few feet back until we solve

the error that wrecks us.

Each time, our bodies make

a sound like yielding,

a comprehension, a crumpling.

A burning barn glitched

behind a restless static of leaves.

Hatchlings on the beach at night

scuttling toward the city,

mistaking it for the horizon.

Devotion extends forward

despite our bodies’ failures.

We leap and leap across

the voltaic rooftop letters

of a falling HOTEL sign.

We kill its current, watch it startle out.

We barely reach the ledge.

But barely is sufficient in a moving world.

Our flashlights make the cattle leak

from pens to pockets of drying grass.

To face ourselves, we respawn endlessly.

There are not fresh hoof marks.

There are fresh hoof marks.

Individual Parts May Be Salvaged

Individual Parts May Be Salvaged

Alone in the house after my death

the robot powers down my phone,

straightens my cuffs,

wipes away fluids oozing after my fall.

While its moving parts tidy,

its cortex sends notifications —

Ben, your mother has fallen & can’t get up.

Matt, it’s already too late,

but get in your car and drive down here now.

Esther, your daughter’s finally on her way to join you.

She’s still the same,

so if you want to maintain your peace & quiet

you might want to descend to a lower circle

or petition Beatrice for a long overdue pardon.

The robot doesn’t know

it’s reached end of life too.

Recycling an intact elder care robot

has been against the law since 2025

though individual parts may be salvaged.

It’s the impossibility of securely erasing data structures

that dooms the robot’s cortex

& sensory appendages

to be rendered.

My neurons, my ligatures

have begun to unweave.

My life of reconstructed memories

shrivel to stories soon to be no longer told.

To my granddaughter, I gave my tidiness,

to my younger son, my zen,

may the annual library sale profit from my books.

Friends, my undying devotion has died.

I remember every friend I ever had

even if I unfriended them.

Now I’m a dead facebook account,

a dead-letter email.

The robot scans for breached perimeters,

an ill-adjusted thermostat,

running water, a kettle boiling dry.

It livestreams my missing pulse.

It will open the door to the paramedics.

This robot has been awfully good to me,

outstanding at finding my glasses

& prompting me to medicate.

I don’t suppose she misses me.

I sometimes called her Rose.

Hakalau Rain

Hakalau Rain

begins as obake —

ghost fog — sails in 

to finish a sunny day.

A whisper of leaves,

rustle of fronds

rises to din

& rain cascades

like trucks

dump gravel,

like madwomen

flail.

My cat leaps

to a sill,

sees tools

mislaid, a bucket

rocketing end over end

to meet & tangle 

with hog wire fence.

I’m caught

in this riot,

made small

by tethered fog, 

this sudden chill,

I’m sodden & smiling,

dripping
with soft rain.

Weeding

Weeding

I disinter roots & branches of 

trees sawed & stumps ground last autumn

rotting at their slow pace.

Weeding is a constant path.

Between stones grow blanched stems,

under them, blanched roots with no stems.

I pitchfork weeds into toppling cones —

nutrient steam flecked with yellow flowers —

stack & restack pyres to stall growth.

By now I know each type of weed

including one I pardoned — its velvet leaf —

like as not, not what I wish for,

no more than sounds at my door at night,

not rain or wind, not possum or fox.

What pitchfork might rout this dark?

Bankei via Stephen Berg

First Song
by Stephen Berg

never was    always will be

mind before mind

earth water fire wind

sleep there tonight

you you on fire

burning yourself

attached

to this burning house

search

all the way back

to the womb

can’t remember a thing

good bad

ideas

self self

which

winter’s wonderful

bonfire’s

ridiculous

in summer

summer breezes

irritate

even before autumn’s

over

rich now

you hate the poor

and forget when you

had nothing

you saved every dollar

a fiend

watched by the famished

wraiths of your self

your whole life

making money

could not pay off

death

clinging wanting

nothing on my mind

that’s why I can say

it’s all mine

you want someone you love

now

only because

you never knew her

you can’t forget

not to remember

someone you never forgot

who?

looking back

you see it one brief evening

realize    see

everything’s a lie

bitter? does this

incredible world of grief

hurt? why wound yourself

brooding on dreams?

no hands    no eyes

nothing exists

touch see

that’s it

all this

in unreal

instead of clutching your head

go and sing

your mind

yours

torments you

because you need it

hating hell

loving heaven

torture yourself

in this joyous world

the hating mind

itself is not bad

not not hating

what’s bad

good    bad

crumple into a ball

of trash

for the gutter

ideas about

what you should do

never existed

I    I    I

finished

with Buddhism

nothing’s new

enlightenment really?

“mine”

keep wrestling with yourself

idiot

these days enlightenment

means nothing to me

so I wake up

feeling fine

tired of praying

for salvation    look

at those poor beautiful flowers

withering

saunter

along the river

breathe

in    out

die    live

day and night here

listen    the world’s

your hand

Buddhas

are pitiful

all dressed up    dazzled

by brocade robes

enemies

come from your mind

right wrong right wrong

never were

call it this    that

it doesn’t exist

except this page

except these wavering phrases

praised abused

like a block of wood straight through

my head’s the universe

can’t hide my ugliness my clumsiness

so I just go along

with what is

without anger

without happiness

nothing to see    nothing to know

before after now

call and you’ll hear

its heartbreaking silence

[from Stephen Berg's The Steel Cricket: Versions 1958-1997]

A Quilt of Wings

A Quilt of Wings

A red bicycle rumbles
the gravel parking apron,
rosemary hedge a blue tangle.

The body crouched above a sprocket
pedals beside a dog on leash
block after sea level block.

Succulents skirt a patio.
An orb weaver hangs flies
above a planter where collards grow.

Fur webbed with splints of bone —
owl-cast on asphalt —
how tongue eats tongue.

Duck bills worry clover,
squirrels tightrope jacaranda,
a quilt of wings squareknots the river.

At the beach the dog’s set free to run.
Chase stick. Chase ball. Chew wave.
Genuflect to pelicans.

Householder

Householder

4:30 am, I’m not getting up because it’s too early. I turn the pillow four times hoping for who knows what comfort. The smell of the sheets surprises me — slightly sour, salty like soup. I could say I’m being called to wash them, remnants of my childhood where no sheets went more than a week unwashed, & with all the graham crackers I ate in bed, my sheets needed washing or vacuuming at least. Household tasks, particularly laundry, always soothe me. I have a washer & no dryer, so when fog settles, I bundle wet sheets into my car & drive to the laundromat. I bring William Carlos Williams to read while the sheets tumble, his memoir of his European/West-Indian mother who lived with him until she died, “sat in her room year in and year out” because she walked to the Club, “without rubbers,” slipped & fell on ice, broke her hip. Elena was nervous, vain & timid, tough & good, & Williams loved her. Sons are like that, not seeing us as slightly sour, overly salty, instead as interesting, kissable, worth cooking dinner for. In one poem he described dancing naked in his attic while the family slept, happy genius of his household. I quit the laundromat with slightly damp sheets, air them dry in late day sun.

Ada Limón

Ada Limón [Monterey Peninsula College]

from Ada Limón's Bright Dead Things:

Long Ago & the Cow Comes Back

In this, the current recasting of the great plummet,
it is I, and not the other grand-eyed cows off Leveroni Road,
who watches the two cloudy youths climb into the backseat
of the long boat-like car during the plunging dark hour
of no turning back. I am not folded into its tongue-red
interior watching the headlights of the passing traffic
trance the windows like far-off lighthouse lights pulsing
at us, lost in our swollen inky sea. In this version, I am
the still bovine beauty staring into Carringer Creek, hungry
for nothing but what comes every day: grass and sky,
and the silvery creek water reflecting the grass and sky.
By the bend in the clean zipper of stream, by the gate
of my life, a metal animal’s insides steam up and I understand —
so many dolorous selves in each of us dissolving into fog.

We Refugees

We Refugees

Cheaper than lock & key, a chowkidar
defends our door. He’s ragged, poor, menial
kin to fruit peels we toss in the street,
yet he guards our home, we, the non-
pariahs, so luminous, bindis scarlet
between our eyes, brilliant silks binding us,
shades & smells of turmeric, chilis,
asafoetida. He waits, his heart
an apple wizened to a frame for pips,
pledged to our stone stoop & waves the well-
regarded across to our baubled inside.
Monsoons don’t muddy these parquet floors
or swamp the beds, we women marooned,
we refugees, our bruises, our spells.

Jane Cooper

The Potato Eaters by Vincent Van Gogh [Wikipedia]

In the Last Few Moments Came The Old German Cleaning Woman
by Jane Cooper

Our last morning in that long room,
Our little world, I could not cry
But went about the senseless chores
— Coffee and eggs and newspapers —
As if your plane would never fly,
As if we were trapped there for all time.

Wanting to fix by ritual
The marriage we could never share
I creaked to stove and back again.
Leaves in the stiffening New York sun
Clattered like plates; the sky was bare —
I tripped and let your full cup fall.

Coffee scalded your wrist and that
Was the first natural grief we knew.
Others followed after years:
Dry fodder swallowed, then the tears
When mop in hand the old world through
The door pressed, dutiful, idiot.

Seabright Beach

Seabright Beach

Not a dog or a person, pink gash

in a low sky, the lighthouse beams green,

the tide’s past high, waves cream

across smoothed sand. The sanderlings

scurry left & right, rise like smoke,

fade like a mirror’s steam. Great blues

jut from a condo roof, one wraps

tight, one pivots — a weathervane.

Perched in live oaks, night herons

white plumed & black crowned wait

at the fish-cleaning dock. Crow gangs

argue, mockers rock, juncos hop.

They don’t feel cold or the little rain

or they do, & have no words to complain.

Drone

Drone

A man airlifts a drone

inches from my face,

whir of blades

the boom of surf swallows.

Strobes streamed

from flyer to phone

mimic the mandala

he’s made in sand,

a maze I can’t tour

without erasing.

This is my living,

he says. His rake

feathers & scrapes

splines & spandrels.

His gait’s uneven,

one flank of him concave.

A harbor seal sprawls

on stone & sand awash

as anchored flesh reveals,

limen of fresh & salt,

air & water, shallow

& deep. Pale spots

dither wet skin.

The sea swells.