from Back to the Mat

Exploring the Edge // bore tide // Estuary

With nowhere to go but down, no leaves or branches,
the harbor seals breathe and doze on the spit

where salt and fresh waters mingle. They slide
into the surf and vanish, borne upstream 

by the tidal bore, trusting the body can be held
as if in a hammock, free of burden, free of weight. 

I too must give myself over, forget the drone strikes
reported to have killed 200 civilians and notice instead

the quiet rise and fall of my chest, the spacious thoughts
like waves. I keep a watch for the bowls of silver fur

that break the surface, that disappear and appear again
a few feet closer, gravely raising shoulders and sleek heads 

to regard me, raincoat shrouded, wavering on the shore.
Their coal eyes fill with what looks like reproach, 

though it may be curiosity. Like Bishop says, it’s clear
they are believers in total immersion. Named sea-dog in Dutch, 

they will follow your kayak upstream and you must resist
the urge to plunge in or run a palm across their wild animal heads. 

Whatever else the seal knows, for a moment in her gaze
I am here on a rocky shore and I linger there to dissipate.

Mean Season

Oxnard, CA

The Santa Anas of my childhood
are back, red katabatic winds

that make your hair stand
electric, that begin as a cold mass

and warm as they unroll and surge
through the Santa Monica range

where the Woolsey fire has jumped
the 101 and is heading for the coast.

They rustle the hibiscus and palm trees,
the unevenly trimmed hedge

of cherry laurel beside the stranger
on his balcony, who shades the air around his head

with smoke. Joan Didion said those winds
dry the hills and nerves to flash point, and likewise

suddenly the man is gone: I watch him slide
between the sliding doors and emerge

street-level, frantically swiveling his head east
then west then east again before breaking

into a run like a person pursued,
like a person possessed by an invisible charge.

In this beachfront neighborhood
we are praying the winds don’t shift,

that the air remains invisible.
The neighbor at 5238 Surfrider

fires-up his blow torch. Brief sparks jump
around his hands and helmeted face

and everything holds its breath
until the buzzing stops. Now the stranger

returns (he wasn’t out for a jog)
with a Red Heeler named Antoinette.

He speaks to her in clipped
censuring French: saloperie, putain du merde

over and over as if his own unsettled soul
were lurking there, trying to escape.

Field Notes on the Toroweap Formation

Grand Canyon National Park

Sixteen days undertaken to take in and to be taken
on the water feed of daily releases from the cold

underbottom of Glen Canyon dam. On the sixth day
of our trip, the seventy-third of John Welsey Powell’s

second journey, I said good-bye to the Coconino shale,
good-bye to Mauv limestone, having unpacked and repacked

my tackle and tools. Powell came to solve the mysteries
of four-hundred and fifty miles of river through desert canyons,

and found hundreds of sites to survey,
name, and define, erasing everything that was there

with his imagination: Marble Canyon, Flaming
Gorge, Horseshoe Bend, Redwall Cavern. Powell’s notes

at first full and even fulsome, dwindled as the situation of the party
became constantly more desperate, and at last became mere jottings.

Underway and under sway we came for the wilderness
that was never wild, for vast distances never empty,

to walk the narrows of Blacktail canyon and span
a billion years with a fingertip pressed to the Great

Unconformity where more recently made Tapeats sandstone
rubs against the ancient Vishnu Schist. We found

our great unknown but with every eddy mapped and every current
quarantined between two reservoirs that fill with silt

and lose a foot of storage each year. It was difficult to sleep
and every morning I woke to half-light, lying crossways

on the raft, adrift or beached by shifting, regulated tides,
everyone else asleep and dreaming of the hike to Deer Creek,

everyone except the yellow-shirted man banging beer cans
into disks—filling his dry bag with our collective excess.

Trip lengths vary depending on propulsion. We were not
motorized. We faced the worst headwinds in twenty years

for June someone said. Everyone irritable and exhausted
by noon, by 1 p.m. My John was not the trip leader

and could not be blamed for missed campsites and side canyons,
for the coffee and potatoes at the bottom of Bedrock Rapid,

but he suffered the missed eddies and broken oars
of near-calamity. His arms and back and abs and legs

the engine that drove the raft through Hance and Granite
and Crystal. Mostly, I wasn’t there to witness, gliding instead

through the needle’s eye in my kayak, skimming the edges
of hydraulics the 18-foot raft could punch right through,

though sometimes I was buffeted by currents, grabbed
by the throat (at least that’s how it feels) and pulled asunder.

The fierce afternoon headwinds were fierce
and even with vertical drops, from the shore I watched John

stalled and silhouetted, windstruck and standing still,
trying to slam the oars forward with his hands.

Imagine lining the wooden boats over most of the broken water
with ropes. Or after half a day of hard labor, feeling the rope,

then the boat pull, then bounce, spin out and tumble down Unkar
or Lava, supplies, and coffee mugs, plates and flour

spilling, spreading and floating downstream, something
always broken that cannot be repaired, an oar or desire,

the skin on your hands. Exhausted beyond measure, sunburnt
and sandwhipped, John was asleep by 8 p.m. or even 7.

I kept company with his dreams which were vivid
and made him scream or cry out, fuck you you fucks,

or help me no help in a voice that arrived from the bottom
of a well. I sang a secret sweetness into his nightmares

and when I slept, dreamed the milky blue of Havasu Creek, the moon
at its core and the ghostly humpback chub

where sweet waters meet the chilly measured arms
of the main. It’s the only place those chub survive

and in the early morning light I could not sleep through,
I tilted my page to catch the glow, to rend the broken lines

and broken waters, to chapter through the days
but brought back only scraps of what the expedition taught:

names and profiles of ghosts, all the riverine shrubs,
bushes, trees and grasses that no longer thrive.