Güd wrtr

Someone asked,
Do you think he might’ve lived longer
if you hadn’t left him?

I didn’t say,
That’s the million-dollar question,
isn’t it?

I didn’t say,
Hmmm… I never thought of that,
not once

in the 23 years since he died
alone in the house he rented
in a small town

40 miles away from me.
No one has asked,
Were you happier

living separately? Never
divorcing because you felt
like family?

Just the unanswerable:
Would he be alive today
if you hadn’t…?

And as hot guilt creeps up
my skull, I feel him next to me,
as he often shows up,

hovering by my right shoulder,
not speaking, just smiling his
sweet smile,

bearded, as he was for so
many years, silently urging
me to look into his

soft olive eyes, where I will
see what he always gave me—
nothing but forgiveness,

nothing, in fact, but
You did good, Toots.
And I believe him.

not today but
some day, let it come
without warning,
say, as I walk
a sweetly shaded path,
coming to the first
of several gentle
packed-earth steps
placed by thoughtful
hands

and let the path
be bordered in late
spring green verging
on summer gold
under the most
ordinary of trees,
which, of course,
only appear
ordinary

and let ocean
sounds waft up
the path,
the lifeblood
of sea meeting
rock on which
generations of
sleek black birds
have courted
and nested and
raised young

and out there
over the deep blue
let a small
contingent of
pelicans dip
and glide

allowing me
to fledge

—you were born
with wings—

and at last
take flight,

joining them
in their journey
into mystery

Crow black
cascading down her back
like kelp massaged
by the sea

braids to her waist—
grown ‘em all my life,
she says to the hoots
of other Black girls
in my classroom
who pooh-pooh
that notion

hair’ll break it gets
that long—gotta be
extensions

Decades later
I stand on a trail
overlooking an
ocean cove,
transfixed by
by long swaths
of kelp curling
and uncurling
like noodles

and I see
Anastasia unfurling
her braids after
class one day,
opening them plait
by plait, letting
the tight curls
tumble down
her back

swaying like
seaweed
undulating
atop the
navy blue

all of it natural,
as real as it gets,
she tells the doubters
running their fingers
through her cascade
of curls,

the chorus of
the converted,
joy ricocheting
off classroom
walls—

Girl! This all yo hair?
Dayum!
This all yo hair!

Dr. Janis peers through the magical
machine that looks like a giant pair
of glasses on a swinging pole—
something Elton might have worn
onstage in the 1970s—
her eyes on the opposite side
of the device inspecting mine.

She’s done this for years, keeping
watch on conditions that, little by little,
darken and narrow my view.
Some can be helped; some cannot.

The eye, she tells me, is as plump
and translucent as a pearl onion
when we are young, allowing light
to easily pass through the dome-
shaped cornea that helps us focus,
through the pupil and the lens,
to land on the retina that turns
light into electrical signals, zings
them through the optic nerve
to the brain, which translates
them into images.

As our eyes age, she says, the supple
layers of onion harden and yellow,
making it harder for light to reach us.

As she looks deeply into my eyes,
I think of my aging layers of onion,
wishing that I might gently peel off
the crackly covering as easily as
slicing into a fragrant bulb to make
soup, somehow returning the pearly
onions of my youth to my ocular field.

No wonder I cry when I take apart
an onion, watching its tightly bound
sections loosen and fall on the cutting
surface. I weep as I inhale its aroma,
as I chop it into small pieces that will
vanish when they morph into soup,
becoming something I can no longer see
no matter how hard I look.

•••

for Dr. Janis Lightman, O.D., with much gratitude

•••

The magical machine that eye care professionals use to determine an optical prescription
is called a Phoropter, a device invented more than a century ago. It measures refraction
or how a lens should be curved and shaped to correct vision.

Even with the car’s A/C pumping
its little compressor heart out,
I feel my left arm burning through
the driver’s side window,
having left the cool coastline,
speeding just a little over
the I-5 limit north toward home
on the second century-plus
afternoon of the summer.

Next to me he says,
It happens, the one who is not
thrown by temps I deem too high
or too low. Get used to it, Janis,
which is funny from one native
Californian to another, one of us
a former lifeguard on a pool deck
that routinely hit 100. My idea
of a perfect summer day
is 90ish with a breeze.

But every degree over 100
feels like 5, and his Honda A/C
is not remotely keeping up its end
of a bargain it probably doesn’t
remember making, which to me is:

Cool when we need cool;
heat when we need heat
already.

Finally I give up, exit to locate
a chain diner with decent bathrooms—
but also, as it happens,
with struggling A/C.

Get used to it, I tell myself,
as if I’m not. Our hots are getting hotter,
our colds colder, and, as I first heard
from a high school biology teacher
in the early 1970s:

It just might be too late to turn this ship
around—this ship we didn’t build
but figured out how to ruin
in a century or so.

On days like today, I can envision
the ship of the world ending in fire,
not ice, which, as Mr. Ford said, might
not be a bad thing. Give the planet
a chance to recover once we humans
are out of the way.

Hit reset. Start over. Perhaps with new
beings who won’t be so greedy,
so dismissive, who insist it isn’t so,
who won’t be—please, climate gods—
like us.

(Moss Cove, Pt. Lobos State Natural Reserve)

After decades of relishing
the feel of soft sand
caressing my toes,

pebbled shorelines
have become my favorite
beaches. I appreciate

the great work over eons
of the sea pulverizing rock
and coral into fine silica,

but how I marvel at geology
in action as I walk over
wave-tossed rocks sculpted

into an infinite number of
geometric shapes, like
the perfect egg-like specimen

today, its weight a solid
promise in my palm.
Nearby, etched in sandstone,

I see the ghost of a heart,
And, not ten steps away,
another heart locked

in solidified sand—
love, embedded
by forces of nature

so great it cannot
be moved or washed
away, even when

the tide rises, even
when we foolishly
imagine that it has

disappeared.

(for the Brandt’s cormorants and brown pelicans
of Bird Island, Point Lobos State Natural Reserve,
California)

•••

A convention of the slender black-cloaked,
long-necked ones gathers on the great rock,
some nesting the next generation into being,
while nearby a contingent of brown giants

somehow barnacles themselves to sharp
angles that look too small for their hulking
forms. Occasionally one great neck will
slowly elevator up, extending its full length,

its long-scissored beak digging into
a troublesome spot under a huge wing,
while some of the smaller denizens
of the rock stand tall, thrusting their

wings behind them, strutting like
sleek models on a runway. They
gather here nightly as neighbors,
the corms and pelcs, with the odd gull

here and there, seemingly in accord,
regardless of their differences—
not unlike those of us on the trail,
humans watching from afar,

we two-legged ones mutually
transfixed by the simple act of
watching wildlife bed down for
the night, smiling at strangers

united in this sweet, shared
moment before we head down
the trail to our own evening
rituals, to let sleep find

all of us miraculous,
breathing beasts.

(at Mission Ranch, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California)

•••

Clouds meander overhead as
we graze on an open-to-the-sky
deck overlooking a vast pasture,
the cumulus rippling over
over meadow grass like waves,

watching dreadlocked sheep
munch soft green grass, taking
turns under a favorite low-hanging
branch for back scratches, their
black snouts raised in what seems
to us ovine ecstasy.

It is as bucolic a sight as any British
pasture where the ancestors of
these curly-horned shaggy sheep
hailed from. But we find ourselves
on the central California coast,
the ocean within sight at the end
of the long field as cheeky blackbirds
parade along the top of the white
wood fence next to our table,
sentries on the lookout for a treat.

It’s a perfect Sunday combination
of good food, a comfortable place
to rest under the hide-and-seek sun,
the sheep resettling themselves
in the grassland like shaggy clouds,
well fed and nodding off—
an excellent idea, we agree,
whether you are bald-headed
or fluffy with fleece.

•••

(for Dick Schmidt)

(At the Tickle Pink Inn, Carmel Highlands)

I study the sign for some time,
thinking I shoulda learned some
Latin when I had the chance,

but that’s why God invented
the internet, so I look it up.
What on earth could restabit

mean? Ah, will remain. And
fortis means strong. And arare
sounds vaguely Italian, which

would make sense if the root
is Latin, the English major in me
decides. But “to plow” what?

Placeto translates to please.
Restat means remains.
The whole sentence, then:

It will remain strong to plow
if it remains. Whaaa? I think
my mind just boggled.

But as we wander this gardeny
oasis perched in the Carmel
highlands, looking more out

to sea than inward, seeing
the inscription repeated here
and there—especially by

the new hot tub overlooking
the Pacific—the English major
clicks in, reads slowly:

Rest a bit for ’tis
a rare place to rest at.

Forget that old saw about
ending a sentence with a
preposition. I’m a sucker

for wise words even if I
have to puzzle them out.
Here we are in this rare

place, this precious moment,
resting near the end of this
first day of June, sun beaming

through ribbons of fog bank
like sparkling topaz, the gem
of good fortune and love,

we two souls happy by
the sea, together, feeling
wealthy beyond measure.

Every time I walked up to the old house
where we stayed—in this place
where people were banished, sick
and dying—I went between the posts

that had once supported a latched
gate that kept out the undesirables.
This house, where the doctors of
the settlement had lived, must have
been especially vulnerable.
The physician had to be kept safe,
free from potential contagion—

unlike the Belgian priest who
begged to be sent to Kalaupapa
in its early days to tend to
the dying—the only one of many
to contract the disease and die
of it there, too.

People speculated it was because
he shared his pipe with the lepers,
his flock of beloveds. They didn’t
know then that the disease
affected only those with a
specific genetic makeup.

But Damien, the man who
willingly came to serve in love,
for years referred to the people
there as we lepers, always
one of them, before the telltale
signs appeared on his skin,
before others came and built
gates to separate the sick
from the well.

And I and others—
in this holy, beautiful place
of so much suffering, so much
heartbreak amid acts of
neighborliness and kindness—

we were there to serve in
this new century, free to walk
anywhere, to kneel on the soft grass
by their headstones, to tidy
and clip, blessedly unhampered,
whisper to no one and
everyone—

rest in peace.

•••

The former leper colony, as it was called then, on the island of Moloka’i, Hawaii, where thousands of people with leprosy, now called Hanson’s Disease, were sent to live and die in isolation beginning in 1865. Father Damien, a Belgian priest, arrived in 1873 at his request to serve the people there till his death in 1889.