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One-Year Old Henry's Blues

   ... start with a higher-

pitched whine followed by grumbles
          low, real low: fussy

Beside the Ocean With a Baby

  for Henry

I'm sitting next to the ocean
in San Diego, a year-old baby
on my lap.

White-edged waves
roll over surfers' heads
like ripples of cream.

A mesmerizing dream,
the sea, at its edge.
The baby and I

Listen and see. We
watch and hear. We
feel the wind.

A cormorant glides
down--from where?--lands on
blue-grey glassy water.

Airplane Mode

Taking off, the passenger plane

grunts like a sow and rattles
like a San Francisco streetcar.

Tacoma's port comes into view--
orange cranes, white warehouses bigger
than football pitches, a stack

puffing white smoke like
an old sailor. Shaggy green
Puget Sound island appears.

On the steel-blue water:
one fishing boat, one container ship,
both as still as sleeping cats.

Through horizontal pink and blue
smears, dark eyebrows arch:
tops of the Cascade mountain range.

Wet gridded neighborhoods
show, spotted with dark evergreens
and yellow & orange puffs

of dying leaves. Far out,
the freeway curves past
the light blue Tacoma Dome,

which looks like a hemispheric
quiz-show buzzer. Now white
clouds curtain the whole scene

& a voice cautions us
again to put all of our devices
on airplane mode.

A Quick Fog

Today's fog seems like a soul

caught in a purgatory,
shunned by earth, air, fire,
and water but also of all four.

It rises up out of earth,
tumbles from air, fills itself
with water, and imitates smoke.
Today it rides down from hills

in San Diego, cools the brown
young women in scant bikinis
and the young men trying
to impress them. It blocks

the dropping dun. It wants
to befriend the moon's waves,
which ignore it and pound
the beach. Right before dusk,

the fog lifts, leaves like a hobo
hopping a train to Mexico.

At Del Mar Beach

At Del Mar Beach, waves

rush, colliding, hurry-hurry,
riding on high tide. They

nibble and chew at clay
banks below multi-million
ducat mansions. Black-suited

surfers look like flies on foam.
Joggers and cyclists pad and pedal
perpendicular to the sand.

I sit and listen to the ocean's
constant secret speech, never
able to translate it, but

mesmerized, almost absorbed,
by it. An ocean is
the grandest siren of them all.