Buried

Where mudflat hits river’s edge:
there, a midden, tide’s quotidian
burial mound. Milled wood jumbled
beside its wild brethren, tangles
of sticks, twisted branches, layers
of debris-flows from past tides, wheel-
barrow rusted in pieces, scant
remains of wooden canoe seat.
Amid the gray-brown deadwood
hides purple cigarette lighter, blue
sunscreen, foil candy wrapper
glinting in the sun, this flotsam
mound’s strange star.

                        Detritus arrives uninvited,
astounding assemblage collected
by forces (tides winds currents
storms) with their own trajectories,
a vascular network astir
with porosity and contagion
among all things, among river
and vineyard, sandbar and floodplain,
wildlife and sewage, housepets and
toxic algae, water we drink,
everything always entering
and leaving larger gatherings.

                                                What will comprise
the middens we leave: accretions
and accumulations interred
among the dead, what will students
unearth here: the bleached bones of
time, skeletons of our structures, our
strivings.

                        Sometimes there’s a pull
to return to our nothingness,
simple truth of molecules. If
I envision going under
the waves, staying, if I see me
surrender as the sand closes
over, as rich loam swallows me,
it’s not from some drive to leave
this existence, just the beauty
of joining my matter with sea,
with soil, watching as rising tides
wash over us all — earth, sand, me.
 

All true, and not true. Humans                                                                                                                                 
harbor many contradictions —                                                                                                                                 
they say in poetry these can all be                                                                                                                                 
together. Breath and extinction,                                                                                                                                 
porosity and isolation,                                                                                                                                 
loneliness and contagion,                                                                                                                                 
me, here, and my billions of cells,                                                                                                                                 
dispersed.                                                                                                                                 



Russian River Estuary                                                                                                                                 
Jenner, CA