Christopher Buckley

High tide, no room to walk
along the beach. I head out
over the splintered planks,
empty but for a hundred pigeons,
a handful of young men fishing,
killing time, having nothing
better to do. . . .

             at the end,
the pier angles toward the heart
of Santa Cruz, an island floating
on channel mist . . . beyond which
the Chumash believed the dead
passed into paradise through
a western gate. . . .

                     I stop a minute,
thinking of my wife in Heliopolis,
visiting where her grandparents
and her mother, as a child,
lived in another world . . .
and where the Temple of the Sun
had an uninterrupted cult
for 2,400 years . . . gone now
with the urban surge,
the incessant sands. . . .

Across the bay, a winter swell
hammers Coal Oil Point, sending
spindrift white as angels’ wings
halfway up the cliff. . . the point
where I surfed 50 years ago,
where only a few boys are out
today catching the head-high waves.
One day, when the tide is high again,
or low, I’ll just keep walking here
toward the island, into mist.