Güd wrtr

(T Street Beach, San Clemente, California)

He’s standing solo on the beach,
holding his board vertically,
its fin buried in the sand,
trying to take a selfie,

and on my morning walk,
even from a distance, I can see
him struggling to get it all
in the frame.

There’s no one around to admire
his effort or take the photo, so I walk
over and offer. And the smile that
thanks me beams broad and bright.

“Really? Thank you,” says, it turns out,
Jesse, the surfer from Texas.

After I snap a good number of photos
on his phone, we stand and survey
the baby waves that don’t amount
to much for someone who’s
come so far hoping to surf them.

But, I point out, he’ll have them
to himself. No local guys hogging
the lineup.

“You can tell people that you surfed
in Southern California,” I say.
“And being on your board
in the ocean on a lovely day
is never a bad thing, right?”

Jesse grins, hefts his board under
an armpit and heads for the blue.

And later, when I return on my walk,
I see him not far offshore, tummy down
on his board, waiting, in the tradition
of those hoping to catch a wave.

He sits and throws an arm up
in the air, a wave of recognition,
if not a surfable one.

And, offering a prayer to the gods
for one clean crest that Jesse
might ride into shore,
I do the only thing I can—

I send him a wave back.

He is that friend who presents a book we’ve never seen
wrapped in soft tissue like a gift from the divine,

which it is, in a way, coming from the long-gone pen
of Langston Hughes, jazz poet of 1920s Harlem:

“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,
and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

In the book Hughes spools out a story to accompany
Roy DeCarava’s photos of African Americans in 1950s Harlem:

“But almost everywhere there is something to set on or lean on,”
someone is setting or leaning. In what few parks there is,

some just set on a park bench… and hold their hands.”
And there on the page are a pair of dark clasped hands

contrasting with those hands’ white nail beds,
the kind of photo our friend might make,

whether the hands belong to the famous, the wealthy,
the common man, the dying. And we read the small book,

touched by the fiction of the real people in the photos,
whose protagonist, Miss Mary, says, “I done got my feet

caught in the flypaper of life—and I’ll be dogged
if I want to get loose.” And that, too, is our friend,

snagged by the sticky flypaper of life and loving
every bit—even the heart-tugging sorrows of it—

this poet photographer content to set on a park bench
and lean in to a stranger whose hands jitterbug

their way through a story, our friend the listener
nodding and smiling, uttering the kindest prayer:

“Tell me more.”

•••

For Genaro Molina, with our thanks for the present of your presence,
as well as the book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” by Langston Hughes
and Roy DeCarava.

There is in Celtic mythology the notion of “thin places”
in the universe where the visible and the invisible world
come into their closest proximity. …
—Rev. Peter Gomes

Perhaps this is why my feet need to meet ocean,
sink into ankle-deep sand, as the water eddies
around my knees,

why I stand with arms up, hands blocking
the insistent sun from my shaded eyes,
because I do not need to see this to feel it—

the thin places where temporal meets eternal,
this horizontal sea plane that extends to forever,
way out there, past sky and rule-straight horizon.

I do not want to leave; I could stand here
beyond time, calmed by swoosh of gentle surf
turning over on itself, by the company of gulls

hunkered down nearby, along with a cluster
of sanderlings moving in concert like an
avian corps de ballet, chasing receding waves,

pecking wet sand for tiny sand crabs
and crustaceans, then sprinting back up
the sand, pursued by incoming froth.

Each spring the small birds migrate to their
Arctic breeding grounds, returning by fall
to these wide, soft, golden sands.

There is no greater prayer than this—
standing in the notch between this side and that—
in communion with the here and gone,

with eternity, this ocean, this sky,
where all is calm,
where all is truly bright.

It rolled in the swells,
tossed up toward the surf line,
then dragged back into the froth

of crumbling waves, a buff-colored
prolate spheroid, slightly
torpedo-shaped, as I stood

on the damp sand, the tide
playing peek-a-boo with my toes,
watching it spiral like a kid’s

foam football tossed around
by the pixies of the sea. I tried
to reach it, hoping that it might

have once been a living sea sponge.
But the pixies pulled it tantalizingly
out of reach again and again,

so I continued my splashy walk.
On my way back, perhaps tired
of the game, the pixies having

abandoned their plaything on damp
sand, I picked it up, felt its slight
crunch, squeezed, waded deeper,

rinsing and rinsing, watching it drip
sandily, imagining its invertebrate life
on the sea floor, wondering how long

it had lived, how it came to be here.
And feeling for the creature
I’d decided it was, I touched it

to my cheek, its gentle roughness
like the few-days-old growth
across jaws I have kissed,

this one smelling of sea and salt,
holding its mysteries tight within
its precious, porous little body.

(San Clemente Pier City Beach,
San Clemente, California)

“But it’s the same ocean,” he pointed out
before we got here. “And there’s sand.”

And no hurricane has decimated this
place like the one that recently ravaged

an island we love in the middle of the sea.
And today, out on the quarter-mile-long pier

that extends its planked arm over the water,
fishermen (and women and kids)

hang their hopeful lines over the edge
of the pier, praying for a fresh catch

as we eat ours nearby at a sunny table
at a place called Fisherman’s.

And afterward, we tourists walk the pier,
indulge in a heap of shave ice

drenched in passion-orange-guava
syrup over vanilla ice cream,

all of which puts us as close to Hawaii
as we can be on a splendid blue-sky day

in late October, looking out at a ruler-
straight horizon, my flip-flopped feet

on damp sand where the ocean’s
warm froth delights my happy toes.

Driving south on 99, that point when
you need a stretch, but you’re antsy
to get there, so you keep driving,

while out the passenger window
the photographer aims skyward
where the sun is extending

its beams with such exuberance
you keep sneaking peeks
out that west-facing window,

watching the clouds do-si-do
with that lava-orange ball
as it slides toward the horizon.

But it’s not until later when you
see the photo that you perceive
the godlight heart blazing

through the clouds that feels like
a wave from one who always signed
her cards “in love and light,”

even as she searched for both.
There she is, you think—with
all the beloveds—masquerading

as an everyday miracle
that you, speeding through life,
so often miss.

(Headline, San Francisco Chronicle,
Bite Curious newsletter, 10/20/26)

•••

Before she was my mother, she was young
in the early 1950s, raven-haired,
smoking slim cigarettes,

drinking dry martinis after she migrated
to California because that’s what young
folks did before they strapped on

marriage and parenthood and mortgages
and partners who would eventually
disappoint them.

I doubt that she could’ve recalled when
she switched from martinis to wine—
jug wine in the Gallo days,

then to slender bottles of white zin,
and in her final years to Moscato—
long after he was gone, when she was

far more lonely than she let on,
when she confided that she’d not
had a friend—a real friend—

since Carolyn died, decades earlier.
And I ached for her then, she who
needed sips of sweetness each day,

she who’d encouraged me to approach
kids on the playground and ask if
they wanted to play.

“And if they don’t,” she’d say,
“find someone else,” which, in my
fortunate lifetime, has led to a swath

of humanity I think of as friends—
even ones I haven’t seen in decades.
And I lift my metaphorical martini

to those who bump me to the surface
when I need to breathe, and to her,
whispering, “Cheers, Mom.”

The man in the ICU, your family
breathing through your painful inhales,
so little comfort in the exhales.
From a distance I breathe with you, too.

Together we swim back in time
to, yes, the pools but also to your
bedroom, sitting on orange shag,
you with guitar in lap, grinning,

teaching yourself what you most
need to learn—from “Mood
for a Day,” so much more than
a piece of instrumental music,

to us harmonizing “When It’s Sleepy
Time Down South,” becoming
proficient in life and love in ways
you have honed ever since.

Now I count breaths with you
in 4/4 time—one, two, three, four—
switching to an easy waltz—
one, two, three. I remember you

in water, floating, swimming,
and on it, fishing. Your great laugh.
May you float now in this time
out of time; may you float back

to your beloveds, who wait,
who watch you sleep, who breathe
with you into the place that opens
with every breath.

•••

For Dean Falltrick, with love.

•••

You can watch Steve Howe, composer, playing “Mood for a Day” here.

(for Donna)

You could probably still get into yours,
though I am far, far from the hundred-pound

lifeguard chick twirling her Acme Thunderer,
ready to blow it if kids running on the deck

failed to heed my call of “slow down!” with
all the force of my 16 years behind it.

But you, dear sister, also rocked the red bikini,
our preferred poolwear for guarding,

saving the one-piece Speedo for mornings
when we taught little kids how to float

face up and face down, to pull and kick
and glide, preferring to be a bit more

covered as gasping faces and grasping hands
reached for whatever part of us they could.

I still love the image that ran on the front
page of our local paper—a classic weather

picture, as the photographers called them—
you, floating face up in the pool

in shades and red bikini, ankles anchored
to the tile gutter, hands behind your head,

beyond cool. A babe, for sure, unruffled
and calm, as you’ve been all these years,

a steadying force in my life and those
of the ones you made into family.

You, my unwavering anchor, my mooring to all
that was and is, the womb-mate who later

occupied the same space in the one who
made us, rocking in that ocean

of the ever and the after.

•••

For the best sister ever, Donna Gail Haag Just, on her 66th birthday.
I so wouldn’t be me without her, and I wouldn’t want to be.
Thank you, DG, for all you do for me, for the fam,
for Mom and Dad, who are certainly, always, cheering us
on from the heavenly bleachers.

The little green torpedo
still hangs on a gnarly vine,
probably past its prime,
but I can’t persuade myself
to cut the cord and bring it
inside.

The cukes and tomatoes
have given me such a lift
on summer’s hottest days—
baskers, they are, lolling
in the patch by the garage
under so much sun.

The piece of me unwilling
to let go of the still-persistent
warmth hopes that the cute
green globes hanging like earrings
from Juliet the tomato plant’s leafy ears
might redden, allowing one last taste
of summer in a tomato/cuke/feta salad.

Just look at them in their natural
state—that hardy little cuke
and giddy tomatoes yahooing it up
like teenagers at the pool
on a sizzling day.

“The party’s not over,” the kids insist,
spreading their towels to lie face up,
eager to soak up every last ray
that shines down on their
perennially golden selves.