In the beginning
there was no beginning
only the diamond moment
hammered from the abyss
of compressed night,
each facet a mirror,
reflecting the one light,
revealing all to come:
the shadow possibilities
and shimmering glints of your face and mine.
Then the Word spoke itself,
the sound embracing us,
before flinging us out in a spiral scream of joy
that echoed into kelp beds, lichen, redwoods,
into the exquisite unknown,
of these shards of light,
of this holy moment.
Midway through the journey of our life
We woke to find our daughter crying,
“Daddy, daddy, daddy!” at 3 a.m.
Rising, I entered her room
Stepping on Leggos, Brios and books
That bit into my foot and ankles.
How I carried her to the kitchen I still can’t recall.
Holding her, I opened the doors and refrigerator and bottle and
Microwave, pushing “4” and “0” and “power”
Until I heard the “beep, beep, beep” of warm milk
And found her mouth and felt the sucking and
I tried to lie down but she kicked and ordered
“Rock-a-bye! Rock-a-bye!” until I held her in my arms
And sang “Rock-a-bye baby on the tree-top,”
Listening to her sing it with me until
She stopped singing and crying and just breathed coarsely
Through her nose. I carried her to our bed, slowly,
Hoping to cradle her between my wife and me in a locked embrace.
But she managed to twist her feet onto me
Use my wife for a pillow, bisecting, connecting,
Until we formed something non-geometric
And she suddenly slept. Midway through the night
We were both awake and could not sleep feeling
Her growing limbs and dreaming overtake us
Midway through the tangle of our lives
When we stumbled and wondered and
Found ourselves shaped into something new.
From my home, looking uphill
at the shadowed green for years
I had no name
for this gray-green matte.
When I heard “coyote brush”
spoken, seen it written, low letters,
thick like this tangled-branched, oval-leaved
thing, I thought it a fitting name,
making a place for coyotes,
rough-cut dogs, matted,
low to the ground, hiding
in the mottled darkness.
Then yesterday, on San Bruno Mountain,
my student taught me the Ohlone myth
that where coyotes peed,
from that muck sprouted the first
gnarled green shoots of the eponymous plant,
smelling of coyote pee
to scare off hungry deer,
hungry enough to try to eat these lizard leaves,
dry, seedy, bitter.
Tonight I might try that trick,
see what grows when I take a leak,
give to the baked clay
around my house what moisture
I took from it, see what spawns
from my dragon’s teeth,
what hydra-headed plant,
nettles spouting hypos,
hemlock numbing seeds,
milkweed feeding caterpillars,
what beautiful death will arise
from my leavings?
by Paul Totah
Bare buckeye branches, green-gray fruit
suspended at the tips of each blade of branch.
Medusa would have been impressed,
would have envied this horrific beauty,
this tangle of bones here in Buckeye Canyon.
She might have peeled its fruit in strips
to stun fish with its poison,
just like the dead tribe did for 5,000 years
who lived in this canyon,
sheltered in the watershed of this mountain
near Bayshore Freeway.
This tribe, whose name I know but cannot pronounce,
kept 20 families in the simple windless sunshine
near their white-specked midden
without fear of grizzly or cougar.
They traded in tule boats for granite, obsidian —
the hard currency of tool and food.
They did war on occasion,
training their quickest men to run ahead,
taught them to dodge arrows, to see them coming
as fast as hummingbirds, to hear their feathers
sing by ears and eyes,
like the song David sang of otter in the bay —
transcribed by Frenchmen 250 years ago
who knew the value of a good tune, catchy lyrics,
who didn’t know their scarlet fever, measles, pox
would ravage this tribe like wildfire, burn
children to red ash, white bones.
Only these naked buckeyes remain, stinging the air
with memory
of a creek ravine running with salmon,
a bay splashing with otter,
a tidal marsh played like a harp
by winds that still blow
among what remains, what endures.
by Paul Totah
10/00
I have never seen silky beach pea before today.
Or, I have, but didn’t care enough
to stop and name the colors — violet, white,
olive, to press finger to petal,
to see its fine hairs
like the hairs on the back of my hand,
my cheeks, and listen to Brian tell me
that hair is hair, and we are all related.
Then I saw more —
its shaky footing on the sand,
the encroaching ice plants and horned sea rockets,
the tidal waves of footprints,
the sickle of wind mowing them low to the earth.
At five-foot, six-inches, I stand, low,
but I’m no extended metaphor for this beauty,
only an allusion to a time long ago
when our lines crossed,
where we intersected
in some genetic game of pickup sticks
and unstranded into man and plant,
each a molecule of the other.
Today, this beach pea teaches me how to walk
among these living hearts beating in tongues of color
to a music
that returns me to myself,
by Paul Totah
3/21/00
Peacock copper
unbelievably blue green
providing insight
into the sea’s green ether
the sky’s earliest blue
each hue of the bird’s
feathery eye
flecked with yellow and rust
dusts of the beginning
adheres to you, glued.
Gemstone formed of
metals and rock,
you, to me, prove God
with your beauty, prove
me, discourse on the
motion of the planets
that move in blue green
sparkles, like bursts of turquoise
bubbles on the foam of the first bright sea.
The line whips like water spray,
like air itself
drawing Ss onto the wind.
Even with roll casts,
using the adhesive water
as catapult,
you see the curves
in every twitch of the sprung line,
in this game of tag where you
strike water, trick fish
and win with hook in lip.
My friend, the fly fisher, jokes
about using little band aids
before sending them back, bruised,
betrayed by feathers, fur, cork, hook.
He has the deft hand of a man who knows
how to see stonefly, dragonfly nymph,
honeybees, the difference between
swirls of currents and ripples of fishtail.
I’m learning to hear
the change in music three fish bring
to the waters around my boots,
to my own currents of blood
as I sense prey, knowing one day
I will die, no catch and release for me,
only hawk talons
taking me upward
into the strong and terrible air.
Fog, like a China wall,
an enameled dragon, silver
slithers and crawls
toward the western horizon
swallows the mandarin sun
whole like a host
down its grey-gauze throat
burying alive all light,
all hope in its stranglehold
on the evening air.
I have seen nothing
more beautiful than this moment:
the death rattle of day;
the spasm of twilight.
by Paul Totah
August 28, 2004
Light takes the trees
and gives them back again
the way the first light bleaches
the hillside, keeps half in shadow
does not move, yet moves
over the frozen trees, dreaming,
still, of winds and fire.
Two birds cross the sky
obscene crows croaking.
They are not hawks, clean
and brooding death.
My cat studies them and now
the sun dances down.
A ghost ship, its gray bulwark
sails above eucalyptus tops,
a prow of wispy vapors,
paints monochrome grayscale in its wake,
erases the light blue morning sky,
pauses
while the rest of the fleet scuttles alongside,
the ghost crew staring me into silence.
The ships are now the sea,
then, slowly, they sink into the green ether
of treebranch, crowflight, rooftop
and the blue bursts like air bubbles
back to the surface.