Even that perfect California evening light filtering through redwoods
is cracks of smoke, pouring through.
I taste it, in the car.

     I'm driving your grandchildren to a house where you are not.
     How is time counted
     in more than seconds since screaming refusal
     with my sister hearing thirdhand

 your giant good heart had stopped.

The fire burns chaparral, 
burns coastal scrub –

      it lifts what was living to the sky.
      Ash drifts down 
      over the living and the dead.

There's country on the radio and they're so sad
There's blues on the radio, they're so very sad
They’ve lost their baby, and they can't get her back.

smoke layers mountains
into watered ink waves on silk

Eyes set against the hazed and orange sun
and its shimmer on the break
of waves splitting over shale,

sedimented ash and the hard remains of living, 
moving north on San Andreas shudders

inch by million year inch.

Rhombuses and dust fall from the cliffs, 
rasp of wind and brine hew them down daily.

     Another September heatwave, 
     another red flag warning,

and the air, stayed,
heavy on us all.

sky behind horizon blur
ocean, breathe for us labored and wringing

These men, your age and talking 
like they aren’t going to die, 

     the ocean tossing—
     in its overwhelm, you wrote,

you were nothing and so free. 

They take you away
duck diving and swimming, 

    ashes held to one friend’s heart,

petals from another man’s garden
garland your final return.

incense an ember reed, releasing
a curl in seaweed and rocks 

Must be a decade since
I stood in this brokedown cove. 
I’ve never been

without you before.

On your knees I drove 
to the Rock, to Palo, rhythm of return 
worn into mind, body, stone. 

Clifftop where we stopped 
to watch the waves crest and smear

then shot the foot-faltering trail 
to its end at a rope-strung rock fall. 
I’ve ransacked everything
you kept and you kept what mattered

which was everything:

scrawls wedged into drawers and bagged,
kindergarten grades, a milk crate from New Jersey. 
Only your cry of jettison, the scattering of detritus
to the winds, nowhere to be found.

Instead a creased, blue inked note—
Save this scrap so you know
I never threw it out, and below that

the name you gave me.

white froth, black bird, 
slick stones, men awash and hooded

You leave us in a dry season,
driftwood traveling light, slipping from
hauled buoys, a single blemished flipper

in the wrack. In the ebb and flood of now and then,

now lodged as storm-carried splinters, washed and swelled
now lost melting in the salt water that takes
us all back in its ceaseless crash.

Cliffs and bluffs slow topple,
shells break into glittering sand and cobbles
jostle in the roar and pull, course and drag

the ground from beneath my feet.
We’re thrown in it with you

No ceremony but the old one:
three women locked
arms wrapped, heads buried,
eyes torn and throats sore with loss

and the waves, the Pacific waves, over all.