Arribada: Arrival of Olive Ridley Sea Turtles
by Maya Khosla
From Canary Spring 2014
Because desire and perfection are tangled forever in darkness,
those who emerge are offspring of an edge
whose salts and sighs echo the waves.
The night rising and sinking under phosphorescence
churned into being
with each wave’s crash and sizzle. A map of cold
green light from which mystery
must surface to breathe, must swell
to the shape of a thousand strangers,
a thousand more. All clothed in submarine suitcases
heaped with expectation.
No choice but to sink to your knees in sand
terrified that life, laden with all her pearls of tomorrow,
could lose her lumbering grip on the world.
And though the turtles cannot afford
to care about perils, evolution does.
And so has created this mad saturation—
so great you could walk miles on their shells
and never touch sand.
Such is persistence. It has no choice but itself,
older than the Jurassic moment
when females began this flipper-footed scraping,
this egg-laying labor, eyes gazing seaward
vertical eyelids opening, shutting, opening
full of tear-gel.
Bob Stanley has organized poetry events in California for nearly fifty years. He has served on the board of the Sacramento Poetry Center since 1997 and currently teaches English Composition at Sac State where he co-directs the Writing Center. Bob has edited two anthologies and published two collections of his own work: Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger (2009), and Miracle Shine (2013). Bob served as Sacramento’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012, and he lives in Sacramento with his wife, Joyce Hsiao.
The Last Rain
The last rain will be sweet. It will be sweet as the first,
sweet as the green, sweet as the sinuous wind through
fields of grasses mixed and flowing; the last rain will come,
the last rain will be sweet.
Though I can not say whether in summer or in spring,
that sound – soft rain – will touch the face of the faun; ears
will lift; that head shall turn to sense the change
of droplets – water suspended in air – life suspended in time.
Insistent, percussive shake of rattle, this last mist
fades too late to be seen as warning. In the heat,
the rattlesnake’s shape slides into sunbanked rock,
its curve ever disappearing, arriving, hypnotizing.
The last rain the spout of the humpback,
a farewell to air in order to signal a new air, trumpeting
what will come to replace lungs preparing for
what will come to replace breath, sound, spray, solitude.
Because someone remembers, the last rain will be sweet.
Each female, each male, in the synapses where we know
greens of meadow and peak, rivulets of white and sky,
the grasses and the deer, the cony, the squid, and the towhee,
the clam and the boar and the human child will remember, at least for now,
in the green sweetness of memory it will come;
the last rain will be as sweet as the first.
