On the Coast near Sausalito


1.
I won’t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sin on that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.

Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.

2.
Fish-
ing, as Melville said,
“to purge the spleen,”
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.

3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.

The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.

Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line’s tension
are a recognition.

4.
But it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creature,
we stared down centuries.


-Robert Hass

Poem 24

For the Mississippi River

I.
Let’s call you thief. When I think of you rustling
through and packing up what you can, you make me
think of my easy surrenders. Terror gets in my bones
easy. I’m the bulb to the frost.

II.
Darling, you tell me south like a well-written love
letter so I think of what holding you would be like:
light as a screen door, violent as the slamming of one.

III.
I try to be more than your landscape of industry,
of barges. Life is hard for all living things and I guess
you’re just the end for some so I go with an open heart

to your broken cities, have built new chambers
in my chest, am cultivating gardens there.

IV.
Since your most recent escape, my decision-making comes
in the form of a blackout stampede like your loose heart.
I take and abandon easily, have learned to regret
nothing, have taken you as my wild mother.

V.
In my poorly constructed letters
I sign under love, yours, always.

-marlo barrera, completed march 2010



*With 2 lines that I think I stole from Bennet Bergman