My children refract light,
trailing rainbows that echo from
the arcs of their arms
between silvered screens.
They are prisms. Crystals.
Clear quartz, angled, imperfect,
attracting light to their
beating hearts, beating
footsteps, oscillating in blues, reds
undersea greens.
They draw light,
release light. They laugh
in undulate colors.
Sex with God;
He, teasing me with first
lines, first longings, letting
me respond in kind
words, lines, we seek
the names of things —
hollyhock, rosemary,
milkweed —
testing syllables,
rhythms until we
consummate and create
new life, old meanings,
new vision, old beauty.
And we surrender to the song.
The layers of mussel, sea stars and limpets
I saw on the rock at low tide
I see echoed in the layers here at Horse Camp Trail,
looking into the vista towards the shore.
First the soft fog, tinged with pink,
then the darker hills in the distance,
the serrated blade formed by trees.
The closer ridge, softened by light
into a gray green brown
dappled with shadowed pines and redwoods.
The closer ridge, each tree distinct,
each bark face clear in the half light.
The trees just down the hill from me,
the madrone covered in Steller’s jays,
wax wings picking berries, drunk with life.
The low coyote bush just at my feet,
white tipped, patient, placated
by sun and wind.
Then my self, layered
with 42 years worth of ringed worry,
old fears self-pruned, no longer of use,
old dreams realized, forgotten,
still cherished, like a hard candy rolled in my mouth.
To this layer of time, without troubles,
breathing cold air, seeing for the first time
living waves of light
to a deeper layer where I synthesize the light
into prayer, into lightening,
into words yet to burst like berries
onto my mind, onto my tongue
into poem turned prayer turned breath turned song
that will save me just when I need it most.
Too many creeks run underground,
making low sounds that rumble submissively
through concrete slabs.
But here, Islais creek openly combs through willows
through this city’s heart, talking
in syllables to lone women walking their dogs.
The gray weave of willow branches
tinged with brown and olive green
tunes my nerves to a looser pitch
quiets my worries over schedules,
safety, human noises, the groans, screeches,
sirens of my speech.
Here on this clear day, I surrender
to birdsong, to the hum of insect wings and legs,
to the slow notes of white rock that
bubbled up once from the sea’s green wash
while, right now, the creek speaks the one word
in clear words over and over on the gauzy stones.
by Paul Totah
March 1, 2000
I learn to love the sunrise;
I wake before the dawn;
I take my time in watching,
and I burn gold when it is gone.
So small, huddled behind the
damp paper towel, the slender salamander
does not move until Dan wets his finger,
touches it to life; I can’t see its four toes
past hinged legs, so small. Only
its sideways eyes, copper and black,
shining with fear
in his clear, Tupperware world.
Brian found it under a log
in its damp home, prescribed by four-foot cliffs
it will not plunge past.
He brought it here to show students
its elusive beauty, snakelike, coiled
in on itself, and shows us
its picture, painted in an amphibian book,
his first book bought with his own money
when he was 10 and in love with mud and ’mandering,
catching larval great salamanders
in the heart of San Francisco.
Now, 32 years later,
they are dying, all of them,
from clean rivers in Costa Rica,
to California, where they breathe poison
straight through their skin.
He tells us, they are canaries,
that they have stopped singing,
that we must help bring back
their damp and loamy song
because there’s no escaping this coal mine,
the only home we have,
shared with, blessed by
these living tongues of flame.
by Paul Totah
April 1, 2000
This hard-scrabble ground,
ice plant
pampas grass
scotch broom
fennel
all come from somewhere else
settles here in the spaces
that split the fog
in a clearing that is not a clearing of the mind
in these gray scale days where spirits sink
weighted by the merest breath of mist.
Like a fairy circle tree,
I am second-generation seedling,
coming after my father, the alien refugee,
who planted himself on the sand dunes
of San Francisco’s Sunset District,
one block from an immigrant church,
having faith that shallow roots
will draw water
through homes
that shoulder each other up
to keep from sinking in the quicksand
of the 50s.
The non-native plants now crowd
the creekside park below my home,
choking out the long grasses.
The fog obscures this grief, erasing memory
of time green and immemorial.
— Paul Totah, August 26, 1998
This inextricable mix
of good and evil
a filigree weave
of dragon’s teeth
and gold. The earthquake
in Kobe, 5,000 shaken
off the bough
and the others know
all is as it should be,
this pruning,
golden shears passing
in the moonlit night, a
flight of diseased birds
beautiful in their descent,
ascending like prayer past
misery, blood, loss,
to the heart of the buried seed bleeding
new tendrils, new whiskers
sewing life and all its boundaries
that make us belong.
It’s this suffering that
redeems us, polishes and
ripens us,
picks us clean
of meat, and bones
dance only to God
at night, painted with
ivory light and
thoughts of the
spaces between each rib,
the rushing in and out of blood
and will,
desire and light.
These things I know
having suffered in
small degrees and
touching a pain
greater than my own.
Elephants singing boulders of notes
Below the skies of our hearing,
The mud of courtship, the cry
Over a dead one-year-old,
The trunks touching his
Soft skin, in procession
For three days,
Trumpeting grief, waking
The forest birds
And poachers,
Telling the water
More sorrow than the broken forest
Can hold.
My cat, Spot, 14-year-old female,
questions, with a gesture of her curved tail,
the meaning of her life. She surrendered
the cat-and-mouse chase a few years back,
evidenced by the droppings in our pantry.
I wonder what angst has gripped this cat
who has taken to mewling her complaints at 3 a.m.,
looking for fresher food, distractions,
the attention of a scratch behind her velvet, felt ear.
She spends her days seeking fruitless change,
complaining on both sides of the front door
that each moment and place lacks grace,
each day holds only circles that spiral nowhere.
If she could complain in words, she would,
often, and ask me to turn the TV to the Nature Channel
so she could watch a tiger’s futile pursuits
and feel better about her own enclosed world.