Sonoma Sea Cliffs: Sketches

All change.

All movement.

All the time…

as shifting light and tide,

as sometime fog,

as wind.

As cormorants and buzzards

tilting and wheeling

and the queer, tiny land birds

Raechel named “muties”

who quick-step into burrows

as we pass rather than wing away.

Long walks along high cliffs at the ocean’s edge:

cove after cove,

eroded headlands,

stacks stepping out to sea.

Weathered wooden steps lead to coarse sand

and algae-lined tidal pools,

green in excess against black rock.

Streamlets sheet the cliff face and

braid dark channels in the lighter sand

in a last assertive act

before the ocean claims them.

The north end of the beach:

a mystery of rounded cobbles.

Why here and no where else?

I pile them on a whale-sized log

silvered by the sun in

a precarious assemblage

for the eye of the next passerby.

The incessant breeze off the water

shears wave tops,

lifts ready-winged birds,

tugs at our clothes.

It cants the low evergreens

just back from the rim,

sinewed in thickened stands,

thickened as only life thickens

after besting repeated storms.

Why, I wonder,

doesn’t the land

stretch tight

with all that air

and, once full,

blow it all back?

Note:   Impressions from Sea Ranch, California, March 29 to April 1, 2007.

This was a time apart for Raechel and me between work and a week with a

dear friend in Sebastapol.