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.