by Tess Taylor
even small rain will lead to mudslides.
Some nights you wake only to feel
yourself for a few minutes grieving
or praying & hearing in darkness
the old tree tossing & tossing & wild
the storm coming
IN OLEMA
February: Buckeye unscissor new leaves.
Cows pasture, buffleheads paddle,
a kestrel perches on a bishop pine.
Now just above us the mountain’s humped spine
pushes north to Alaska.
Extinct invertebrates ride sea cliffs through time.
Even these stones have lost cousins in Mexico.
Even this freshet is landmass torn open,
even these rocks are reft from each other.
Each shelf pulses onward, a restless swimmer
looking for land though nothing is still.
Gray whales swim through ocean explosions,
along continents forged of cracked dispossession.
Sunset today: The ridges grow luminous.
Sharp air, dark spice: horses exhaling.
They stomp on the cold, steaming, visible earth.
We heat the stove. The children are napping.
The cabin’s the raft on which we are floating.
Below us the crust is molten, is nationless.
We only light our lamps on the rift.
V
ENVOI: SAN FRANCISCO
A number of the ships, wharves, and other infrastructure of San Francisco’s Gold Rush waterfront lie buried beneath the streets, sidewalks . . .
—Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaelogoy of San Francisco’s Waterfront
City of shipwrecks. City of water.
Sand hills where mountain lions
prowled above windjammers.
City whose first Anglo historians proclaimed
themselves to be the only modern progress
& promised to “sweep away forerunners”—
who wanted to bind the world’s many peoples
& with their new port to do China
“what the British had done with India
(but sooner).”
City of Gold Rush & bust & boom,
city of mudflat, of private wharves.
Buildings to ships, ships into buildings;
forest to everything;
city of old growth & redwood pilings.
City of whores & Mackinaw blankets,
of Irish whiskey & fireproof paint,
of schooners abandoned for goldfields
the Niantic the Apollo the General Harrison.
City whose abandoned ships became
floating opium dens next to floating prisons.
City of otter pelts & shovel salesmen,
whose white settlers funded their own microgenocides;
city of quick fires & tallow & opium,
of murre eggs stolen off the Farallones—
City of landfill & movable real estate
where right now a woman in underwear
howls in the street
& a barefoot teenager
scratches his sores
& an addict begged the last of my rice
just outside this room where I am writing
city of faultline city of water:
As much as of anywhere I am of you.
NOTES
The town of El Cerrito, California, lies along the Hay ward Fault.
The former Contra Costa Florist’s shop on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito, established in 1934 in the offices of a former quarry company, was run by the Mabuchi family, who during World War II were interned first at the Tanforan Park Racetrack in San Mateo before being relocated to the Topaz internment camp in central Utah.
Portola Middle School in El Cerrito, California, was built in a landslide zone but has since been torn down and rebuilt elsewhere. It has also been renamed Korematsu Middle School to commemorate Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, who fought in the courts against internment. On December 18, 1944, in a 6—3 decision authored by Justice Hugo Black, the US Supreme Court held that compulsory removal of the Japanese to internment camps, though constitutionally suspect, was justified during circumstances of “emergency and peril.”
The poem “Raw Notes for a Poem Not Yet Written” is for Roberto Santiago and Jasmine Hyman.
At the 2017 Centennial of El Cerrito, California, descendants of the original Spanish heirs to the Castro land grant were invited to march in the town’s parade.
The town of Olema, California, lies along the San Andreas Fault.
The city of Albany, California, has filed a petition to remove the white cross from Albany Hill.
In 1956, the Castro home burned, creating space for the El Cerrito Plaza. The individuals who set fire to the 1839 adobe house were never prosecuted.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning,” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book, Work & Days, was called “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and named one of the ten best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Taylor’s work has appeared in Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, the Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. She has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered and has taught at UC Berkeley, St. Mary’s University, and Whittier College. She served as Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University Belfast and was recently the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. Her book Last West was released by MoMA books in 2020, and was part of the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures. She grew up and lives again in El Cerrito, California.