staring at the Pacific

standing so long staring at the Pacific calls up landscapes and moors

I’ve never seen, undulating, trees pulling up roots tipping into gullies,

rivers can’t hold their cuts but flood the drenched grasslands,

the sparsely populated towns, low-slung houses, graffitied barns,

“CARPE DIEM,” they wrote, no one knows who

did it, the protester’s sign reads “in 30 years” the highway underwater,

today an Emperor Tide at its height, a future beginning before it begins

the slough already level with the road
the next town over already under sea level
segments of Highway 101 already at risk
a nuclear storage facility on the bluffs

gestures of the habitual

we note them, weeds along the neglected.

the thistled tufts of a vacancy. a furry twig.

side-by-side in which the whole swallows the one.

in which a body leans towards the fence

dissolute with age and plasticwrap.

a gesture out from the torso, stuck there in the air.

the way it holds itself now, self-bent, aslant.

a lesson in gesture (gererem, a way of carrying)

across generations, the body, next to the fence, the wall,

a hand across the rivets, skin scraped from three fingers,

in submission to material, known by iteration,

inexorably across time, a number of days until it’s the given,

not the original moment of pain

eelgrass

across the highway laid out on a morning beach

strands of Zostera Marina, ribbons of green

letter shapes [Zostera, Greek=belt, girdle],

mark the days on walls of collapsed sand,

counting how many are left in a season, a decade

a scrawl of letters written in strands missing a serif, a limb

the usefulness of the world’s plants [one square mile up to ten liters

of oxygen a day], our need of them, thick ones like ropes,

escape from a climate in free fall, a wish we keep wishing,

keep walking, keep wishing

hearing the sweep of oars: a dream

all quiet after the storm surges through things, seaweed hair

just under the surface, awake finally, dislodged by the sweep of oars

intertidal filaments wavering like fingers pianoing the air,

nervous habits extruded into plain sight, fanning open pages

glued together by humidity, age, residue from the skin of hands

turning each over slowly those days when she taught me how to open

a new book leaf by leaf

each day patches strewn across the sand imitate filaments, rivulets, branches,

we hear too with other than our ears, the oars dipping in and out—

the word plash, 1522, probably imitative