My new poetry collection, Gods of Water and Air, will be released by Kelsay Books in the fall of this year. A mix of poems, prose poems, essays, and even a short play, it will be an homage to the forces that grew me and sustain me: the ocean's edge, the people shaped by this landscape, our history, and above all love's failures and victories. Death's failure to erase it. It is really a book of odes to these daily gods. Thank you, Karen Kelsay, for selecting it and giving me such scope to finish it! Here's a sample:
O Beautiful
As we pull up and park at Point Reyes,
a woman
lowers
her
binoculars,
and
points: Eagle!
We raise
our glasses and scan
the hills, see a white-headed fledgling
standing
on a ridge, outstretched
wings
sieving the wind.
His
pharaonic beaked head
turns
slowly. Through trembling
lenses,
we watch the Golden
Quarter
come alive--
O, beautiful
Descending
to the estuary,
we leave behind his practice flights,
as he
hoists up, free-falls and strikes.
His
freedom is law-forged.
He’s
a leashed kite
tethered
to this range
where
a few more eagles
nest
each year, their circles
pruning
shore and sky.
At
the Lindsay Wildlife Hospital,
a tethered
eagle hops atop a cage.
His broken wing created a captivity
where
he’ll live longer
than
his cliff-roaming
cousins.
He flaps
in
tight
circles,
snapping
his wings’ dark flags.
We
stand back,
doubting
the chain
as
he puzzles us
with
a hard black eye.
originally published in Terrain
