To the Final Cinder

Remembering Steve Abbott

Dan Calder

Doug Carter

Gerry Coletti

William Dickey

Martin Fleischer

Ron Garner

Don Gillis

Jay Hayes

Jim Holloran

Ross Marbury

Michael Rubin

George Stambolian

Steve Steinberg

Shelby Topp

Deb Watkins

and…

Long before it started, people had claimed the land

from the dead below San Francisco whose bodies

were re-buried in Colma. New storms have blown the sand

off broken tombstones from the last two centuries

that like discarded manhole covers, ruined pediments,

dug up foundations, concrete slabs were tossed

for breakwater on the beach. The sea never relents.

Every few years, it exposes the names of the lost.

This morning, two gulls fell on the Embarcadero, dead,

white, plump, unbloodied. Their fellows overhead

circled and keened, their looping bodies, dawn bright,

clouding the blue sky, wings flapping as in a rite,

their cries like rhymes, as the tides take form from regrets

and mourning is the wind that blows through sonnets