[all poems below from The Oratory of All Souls, Copyright 2023 by Richard Robbins]

Wave

Every day and always, the stray pebble finds him, an eye looking up from the path to another’s execution, the camouflaged jury of peers, beneath which the earth goes on with its thinking.

How will he ever know the way around it, eye looking out from a 900-year-old painting on granite, eye of salmon up from the depths of a glacial lake, eye of octopus and rat, eye of daisy, eye at the end of a sentence.

On long drives across desert, the earth has its way with him, wind and grit in his face, his neck turned to leather. The sun screams quietly. The large birds circle.

Over the mountains, he smells the ocean salt again, the smell of a son's head moments after birth. The basin spreads out 80 miles toward the sea, basin of a million homes, a hundred thousand crimes of love or theft, acts of mercy one at a time under a fog that will leave God blind for hours. Cars explode across the arteries expanding in every direction. The salt settles on everything, living or dead.

Every day and always, the wave that spins above him, a bright wash of turbulence, a prayer for the new life. He lets tide pull him from the sandy shore. He walks avenues of the great western city, nodding to strangers, casual with air, even as the undertow nags at his feet, even as persons on the beach will blur into the white of their own care.

How will he ever know the daily way back to solid ground, to loved ones with their own rituals of renewal.

How will he know the eye falls beyond him. Even the machinery of the world will find its way back from loss. Even as it carries the grief of billions. Even as the blood on its surface, blood of birth or blood of revolution, raises the flag of its shame and its reward.

At the Shore

I begin with the soul, that escape

artist, that meme. And what the dress draped

across the beach chair will shout like a clue

to each wave. And what bodies will make

of disappearance. And what, since I

have begun, the abandoned body

gathers to its tote now along with towel,

snacks, and creams. And what sunlight reading

comes home to a dark house. And what new

absence a mortal discovers. You

couldn't know what happens, the emptiness

says. Even the dust has moved away. 

Leadbetter Point 

Salal along the trail from Leadbetter Point

down to the Bay. Goat's beard lichen on every

kind of tree. The Sitka spruce. The elkhorn

moss. The broken empty egg of plover.

The washed-up, upturned crab. The vegetable

scat of coyote. The elk, ghosts of the forest,

moving bayside to oceanside and back

and no one knowing. The sun rising

from behind the coast range, rising across

the clam and oyster water. And ocean

wind subsumed by fir and cedar in the mile

between there and here. And shade settling onto the grove

of old growth. You are never really

alone. Not with your lost sister's face

still in the chop. Your grandfather's voice drifting

up the tidal flat from a cluster

of boats. Not with your wife and sons still moving

slowly in Midwest ice far over

those mountains like a dream. The mind

could sweep them away, or the mind

could fail, and still the inner weather would find

these monochrome grasses more beautiful

than color. This clump of ditch weed tamped down

by bears. The bald eagle screech sudden

and invisible. The heartbreak moment

to moment, run through by swords, because break

and mend is everything you didn't

know you missed. Or so the angel will tell you

once you recover again, or stand

upright again, once you move your mouth

around the holy host of first words. 

Secret Father, Beginnings

What would it mean they knew him father

all along, holding a finger, then

the whole hand, kissing him good night, before

each year the steady, cold erasure,

first the two arms meant to hold them, ears

intent to hear. Science or magic,

he could barely find himself those mornings

discovering the closet empty,

half his body become the space he

used to fill, all his voice the silence

they had groomed him to enter, dividing

even, finally, from each other, three

hearts now, three bodies disappearing

into separate slipstreams, three hearts left

to name each invisible self, the air

and landscape of each quiet continent.

Looking for the Man in a Field

Would the man stand at the end of a knife, the turned-up head of cauliflower.

Would the man wipe sweat from his face, fold a red handkerchief for his pocket.

Would he sit in the dust and shade beside his truck and laugh between bites of a sandwich.

Would he whistle as long as the tractor starts.

Would the man say a rosary for each row of grapes or lettuce.

Would the man curse or befriend the sun.

Would he become the movement of an arm, a leg.

Would he think himself some other place, on a front walk where Marisol, Peter, where even Hector the good dog would greet him after the light had failed.

Would the man burn to nothing like morning fog in the rows.

Would the man leave his shadow there.

Would he walk back out of darkness like a ghost or like dawn.

Would any word he is saying come from the dark, the light, or the vine.

Did it find the man in the field.

Did he and the field move inside each other until the word found his tongue.

The Venice Boardwalk

Secret Father waits

until she's twenty to break

the news. Skateboarders

weave around them in a roil.

He'd been the one to buy her

coffee and a roll,

to talk long in the wave-churned

haze about common

friends or the architecture

of forgiving. She saw whole

desperate blocks flattened

to sand. He a tsunami

that might unhinge them

if they let it, all the grief

one grief beneath that blue noise.

Watershed

My grandmother sent me to bed those days at last light, leaving the dark to adults on the cabin's front porch. The sound of the creek made me sleep, but not before I counted its dozen voices over stone and pictured gnats balled in their ellipses, like cartoon atoms, over the roil. My grandmother sat for the first time all day. My mother smoked. My grandfather struggled in a metal chair to read the last good stories in the Los Angeles Times. No one flipped on the outdoor bulb because of the moths it drew. The last horsefly pecked and buzzed at the screen.

The sound of the creek made them talk. Maybe, like me, they heard their own voices in the water. Maybe, like me, the water gave them words. All that conversation fed by snow from the eastern Sierra. In no time, even in that heat, the melt plumped alfalfa fields along the narrow road to Bishop. It filled the bellies of horses.

They talked about time. I thought a lot of the one black widow under the floorboards waiting that week to find me, but before I slept I mostly heard them talk about time. A Scottish city where his father was born. My grandmother's Idaho. My mother's life before children. All gone, they would sometimes say. Then they would start again.

I don't know how much of this is dream. The creek made me sleep. The porch filled with story and dark.

Then came the morning we drove back to LA, down the Owens Valley, its water stolen by the city, its lake turned to alkali flat, most farms gone bust. One desert edge, a sentry gate—all that was left of Manzanar. A dirt road, a sign pointing into the White Mountains—some brutal crest where bristlecone pines first began to live two thousand years before me.

As I grew into a young man, I was afraid of cities and of mountain passes. Both took my breath away. If I was driving, in eight lanes of freeway traffic or on a two-lane pass at 8,000 feet, my arms could turn to stone across the steering wheel. I was only learning then about panic attacks. It never occurred to me that the closeness of people, or the impossible distance from them, could produce the same result. I did not want to leave this life.

Sometimes I would not be able to make it stop—was not able to tell myself, as I can now, Go ahead and die. Words which became, after a while, a cure for my anxieties. The thing that makes me breathe again. All gone, the three of them would sometimes say. Then they would start again, the creek still falling its thousands of feet out of ice into the lives of animals.

Looking for the Man in a Third Grade Class Photo

No one ever knows who she looks at

finally, in such eternal moments,

Katsuko burning him through and still through

with her fabulous eyes. Nor Tragg Gunn,

poor spondee, a boy whose life grew, we

can all hope, more lyrical than his name.

No one should know what iron filing

finally lodges in the heart, or if

a comet delivered it, or a

dull music. He was, in his young way,

in love with the Japanese girl. He was,

in his own way, alarmed by ugliness

in two words. When a man is, atom

after doubling atom, the current

destination of such things, what can the

thirty-eight of us do but bore in

to the silver gelatin behind

the lens, inside the cave where an oracle,

who wants nothing to do with us now,

reads God's verdict to another age.

My Father Without Answer

In his last months, my father shuffles room

to room, and when he speaks his voice begins

and stays at some upper register lost

since he was a boy. Maybe it’s the inner

ear, maybe the meds:  He’s back on the Navy

deck, 1946, not knowing where

one foot will land. He doesn’t rave. He’s not

helpless. But he won’t know where the ship sails

until he gets there, the cane his only

weapon anymore:  for pointing, to stand

up straight. In his last months, he never says

goodbye. If he tried, the sound of him would

only squeak anyway, sound the hinge made

that day our mother closed the door on him

for good. That morning, because it was his

job, because he had no other answer,

he drove his semi-load all those hours

to the secret test site in the desert.

Across el Golfo de Peñas

            —southern Chile

Once in a man's life he must

go deep inside the heart of

complicated sea, past shredding

rocks, to where the mermaid

teaches him to breathe under

water, even as she makes

the rust, the iron wreck of him.

Disappearances

            —To remember is to pass through the heart of those who are absent.

Her boarding the train with such a small bag of things.

His stopping at the corner before turning to drive nearly all 700 miles west in the dark.

The salmon landed, their last silver dances on the boat deck.

The swallows and finches that have stitched our skies.

The look at your mouth, not seen for years now, even though we have rarely been apart.

The willow the creek bent around.

The Chinese elm, center mast of those last months in Los Angeles.

Silences of my grandfather meaning a new death had arrived, and the luck. Silences of my grandmother meaning the suffering of the body would stay, and the grace. Silences of my mother meaning shame that never left, new joy she never felt deserved.

The road through the desert, valley to valley, one dry sink to the next.

The park filled with old neighbors, the forest edge, the beach where everyone faced the wave line and the blue immensity beyond.

The condor at the bottom of the world.

My plaid sleeve on fire at the kitchen stove.

The cyclist gone still at the curb.

A Loch Leven on my line up the far reach of the gorge, past the last cabin, the silent cougar, past any other voice, past disappearance to the other side of now.

The Past Complete

My father's father drank until blind. He

beat my father bad and often. Who knows

what drives a man to blacken the eye, break

a boy's arm? We want a diagnosis.

My father's mother gave him to the nuns

to save his life. Then took him back, surrendered

him again. She worked around the worst drunks

and took her beatings too. And don't dare

judge her for not leaving. Our comfort wants

the danger gone, boy and woman safe, the past

complete. But my father's father, even

now, could use the terrible love of our

imagination. To stop the hour.

That fist. To hold this through-line between us.

American Story

It would be so Brooklyn of you to tell me you lived in Brooklyn.

After a record thaw, the mountainside slid down onto the town of Thistle, Utah, in 1983.

When we rode our bikes in the national forest, we dreamed of outracing the mad chase of bears. Our bells jangled against the quiet. Can the young ever be forgiven? We were so naïve.

In Des Moines, a man stopped in the middle of his own bank robbery to weep over the terrazzo tile. I’m sorry, he said. This is a turning point in my life. I don’t want to miss it.

You may think I’m toying with you. May wonder why, in this tiny car, I am driving to the Gulf of Mexico, to the recently rebuilt marina. And now to Wichita, where we await the vortex. Now to the scorched ground of Montecito, where the tiny car of words will sink wheels-deep into the ash.

It would be so Los Angeles of me to tell you I was born there. That I ate at places you have only read about in a James Ellroy novel. Like C.C. Brown’s. Like Vince & Paul’s. I saw the Baldwin Dam break open on live TV. I saw Gary Powers’ helicopter go down. I saw snow on Huntington Beach. I lived in Los Angeles so long they named an earthquake after me.

Tell me your real name. My pink on your olive hand. My green eyes into your brown. We can begin again if we like. It’s our birthright, the first American story.

Memory of Water / Constellation

            —a painting by Brian Frink, 2014

The death of a star trails its light

all these billions of years

only to find a human drawing lines

pulse-to-pulse to build beast or archer.

We would make a story to see through the night.

Each stringed thing would wait for

extinction to find it, to undress

mythology and belief. In no time, not a thing

would remain but Leviathan

commanding the great curved deep, and above it

the face of the waters

and across that the first breath moving again.

The Great Litany

For Lent, we twenty or so will begin with call and response:  Four short lines of praise for Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Forty long lines of petition.

To deliver us from our offenses and temptation. To spare others from their prison cells, earthquakes, murder. To keep our President faithful to the oath. To support workers in the field, open others' ears to good words. To forgive our enemies, persecutors, and slanderers. To turn their hearts. Page by page.

We can barely stand for the whole prayer, some of us, the west window still dark this time of morning, the baseboards ticking slow to temperature. The ocean falls into itself two blocks away. We might stay upright if we could walk there.

Our children all left us in their time. I know that much about these strangers. One man has a tremor in his left hand. (Later, his wife will pass the plate for both of them.) Another man, tall and bald, three pews ahead, wears thumb-sized tufts of gray hair he missed behind one ear. (Later, he announces the community dinner for immigrant relief. He is selling tickets.) You can only see so much from this angle. 

Our children all left us in their time. I know that much about these strangers. Some had to change the locks. Some had to burn their own houses down. I know they still wonder about it. They were workers in a field. It was harvest.

The ocean falls into itself two blocks away. Years back, bits of Fukushima lingered there at first light, pushed up, pulled back in the foam. Early walkers couldn't read the kanji. One dog ran to sniff, then shot back when the last push of wave lifted the bits to its mouth. This is the Body of Christ, broken for you.

We might stay upright if we could walk there. The nave filling with the heaps of our requests:  For all animals and fish in the sea. For our dead ones. For travelers. For women in childbirth. For those suffering in mind and body. The birds of the air. The clouds that will bring rain. For those blind of heart, from pride or envy. For the end of war. For the end of loneliness. We could walk there in any weather, reach our fingers down in the wash and bring the salt taste to our lips. The Cup of Salvation.

At the Museum of the Disappeared

            —Santiago

So we descend to the coup

like a beach at low tide, stone

by stone by broken bone. The

pools fill with urchins, each clam

its own page of history.

Then a voice commands us to

rise. It’s the ocean talking.

Memory of Water / Shoreline

            —a painting by Brian Frink, 2014

Who knew memory

is concave. Who knew its tide

didn't need us or

our tiny boat. Just to wash

through and under it toward that

beach, that beach.