Sunset Beach

      The ocean is not a dark mirror.

      And the beach spreads its minutes largely: driftwood, folding chairs, apple grass, pelicans

      tracing and breaking the breaking surface.

      The sun hits the water directly and the world seems briefly measurable.

      Not a dark mirror: a place for diving foundation for becoming.

      Before, when the other was listening, speaking was easier.

      Unnerving clarity with the sun directly overhead.

      How to represent another thing or its feelings.

      Or a certain dog or cat that must be named Alice or Scout, particulars that announce themselves and reach out, or don’t,

      maddening to others, the way the path of the sanderling must overlap the path of the sandpiper, for some truly small amount of time, but historical

      still. Not a dark mirror, knowledge full of seams and breaches: the sandpiper and the sanderling must be

      invented again, sometimes together sometimes apart.

      When did enormity give way to measurement?

      (Someone is always eager to explain.)

      Once sand poured in here as the surf washed the sediment back.

      When the other was listening, speaking was.

      You want to order yourself away from the ocean’s will to

      misremember.

      The Ohlone came here to clam. The sandy hands of the Ohlone while they clammed.

      (Off to the side, a boy with a red kite.)

      Someone should walk down through the pines and ask you to coffee or a late lunch.

      Someone should appear on the beach with a video camera and five or six sharp pencils.

      Foundation for becoming, underwater dictation, screeching gulls, your great loves and dislikes.

      (Now the historians cheer and fly their kites.)

      Once this place was a rancho. Joaquin Castro planted the cypresses that line the main road.

      Within the ocean’s voice lies one perfect version of the story

      no one can remember. Or the future is the place to better remember: the future doesn’t needle

      like the past: it is lovely until perhaps just before it arrives.

      Acting as the self flickers and disappears (goodbye self!), or becomes temporarily brand new.

      When the other was listening, speaking.

      After statehood, Leslie Kester bought the land for $10 down, mortgage to $27, 500, planted eucalyptus, raised cattle and chickens on the eastern slope of the dunes.

      The hiss of the eucalyptus.

      Not a dark mirror: for planting for perfect vision and grammatical mistakes.

      Crab life, mollusks, and further beneath: sea urchins, mushroom coral, lantern-fish.

      (Refrain: a place for diving, foundation for becoming.)

      “The two-mile dip into the oceanic abyss ends at a seafloor that is featureless but for granite outcroppings, shale reefs, or the remains of shipwrecks.”

      The shallow structure is written in waves.

      Harry Hooper, an outfielder for the Red Sox, bought part of Leslie Kester’s farm in 1925 and called it Sunset Beach.

      You’re worried you may not understand, and your questions have been overlooked.

      In 1929 they began to build houses on the bluff: first the Lyons then the Snyders, the Pages, the Bleshes, the Rosses and the Wilsons. Frank Ross ran a diner at the bottom of the hill.

      Needing things to be sung around the campfire.

      A foundation lacking reflection. Shipwrecks.

      Dusk now, and the curlews run along the beach with their long beaks and Napoleon legs: godwits and gulls, smashed up bits of shell.

      (The hiss when I say eucalyptus)

      Looking down and away from the sunset, a sky without fretfulness, reflecting wholly what the viewer lacks in his enormous failings.

      They planted dune grass and apple grass and sea fig, Monterey pine, Arizona blue cedar, pyracantha.

      (When the other was listening)

      The beach was a POW camp during the second world war, and every year, three or four clam diggers would drown.

      The line between water and sky deepens : symbol for slippage.

      And in another place you rode your Schwinn the two miles down Bell Road to Dewitt Cinema and paid fifty cents for The Love Bug, or The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

      How many other people were there too, ordering themselves around the joys and sorrows of 1979.

      You like to remember it as a large tracking shot.

      It reaches up above