Notes From the Shore - Prose Poetry

Earth & Cloud photo by Renee Podunovich

Notes from the Shore

I. End of the Line

The city’s edge. A solid concrete pier meets the softly moving ocean. Once, waves shaped the amenable land around it, mingled with melodies of shorebirds and the rustle of dense foliage. Today, it trembles and sparkles in rock salt and solarity, splashes against the solid city fortress where

           —the fluid nature of us—

becomes formed and concrete, imprisoned in the shapes that shaped minds conjured.

In the Mission District, the Miwok Indians became slaves to the demands of a foreign and decadent god, from fluid to static to extinction. Now, what was preached has become frozen and absolute. These appearances no longer yield to elements— are stubborn and unwilling, will go kicking and screaming.

II. Everything is a Mess

We are solid and fluid, blood and bone; a metallic river of drivers on the homo sapiens highway, a 21st-century traffic jam. From beach and redwood to Golden Gate, autos assemble on the freeway, sit in obedient rows. The road starts to sizzle, black in the midday sun; exhaust fumes come in through the vent like ghostly hitchhikers; hot, irritated, annoyed— wondering about this whole process of every day all day working until we die of breathing noxious gases.

In the bowels of the city, pedestrians roam the humid and dense streets. A child picks up a broken toy from a box of trash on the curb, is sought out by steam ghouls that escape from the gutter. Lingering smells ricochet off the cement, live a thousand lives from nostril to nostril. Small pigeons try to clean up;

           —this is life—

III. Money is a Temporary Buffer

Across the Bay, Sausalito side, where everything appears to be just fine. We are water; we are stone; we are solidly fluid. We are bursting rays, uncontainable, yearning to escape the milky prison of consumer numbness 

           —we try to remember— 

inside the heliographic night, inside yoga studios and juice bars, inside workshops and self-help, looking for something inside, looking for trails of invisible wonder through the city’s slumber, searching deep in the bones of skyscrapers, between the ribs of excess, picking at the toxic leftovers of the brilliance of industry. 

I contemplate the collapse of civilizations, but this city still appears to move in perfect order, does not submit willingly to the cannibal tide.

IV. It’s All a Blink of an Eye

Time is a bodiless maritime goddess, her hair like smoke meshing with wisps of fog, taking us to different places, the places in our minds. Polished smooth obsidian city, your impenetrable hardness, it is only my perception. I could be in heaven without celestial eyes.

          —Perception is a collective endeavor—

This city could have been anything, could become malleable again to the watery heart, could discover that it is only an infant and climb into her arms.

V. Once the Earth was Covered with Water

Shabby seagull dives into that opaque matriarch and does not resurface.

Renee Podunovich, 2021

Water Will Find You (because you belong here)

Road to Everywhere photo by Renee Podunovich

Water Will Find You (because you belong here)

at Cannonball Mesa 

I. Junctures

 all roads end. especially an unmaintained, 2-track county road increasingly indistinguishable from landscape, an obstacle course of boulders and ruts that will knock the bottom out of the vehicle unless you stop, park, put on your daypack

           and begin to trek.

here, my footprints begin, stirring fine flushed dust rising in spirals with each step, airborne and errant on Spring Equinox winds that whoosh a primordial oomph, carrying the smell of minerals and ancient silt, the touch of saltwater on swaying waves, hues of cerulean ice melt, songs of elk bugling under moonlight;

           all of these drafts in on invisible vapors from snow-covered crests,

           from as far west as the Pacific Ocean and its volatile fault lines holding visions dreamed by sunsets.

II. Anonymous

 on some spring days in the high desert, the wind is intolerable, but today, it feels like being shaken awake, purified, cleansed, my hair and lungs full of disorderly elemental intersections. I am in a new current; I accept this baptism by whirlwind, this walk into expanses so endless it is like stargazing. snow from distant mountain ranges travels beside me though its path is elusive in this bone-dry vastness, and that moisture is never easy to discover. through Sage, Juniper and Yucca tangled into a weaving of peculiar geological mishaps—I travel so far that I am suddenly small and unknown but somehow at home; 

            how awe is simply the sudden recognition of place,

            a sense of belonging to the vastness you had forgotten.

III. Desert Emeralds

hidden by boundlessness— sudden chasms. at the edge of one of hundreds of crisscrossing canyons, I can see a pool of water lingering in the bottom, evidence of a recent snowstorm. sparkling a promise of well-being, it beckons me down a narrow path where suddenly cold, damp air rises from a sandstone overhang, greets my dusty face, shivers my mammalian body, invites me into a shallow cave with walls covered by vibrant, verdant moss, green like a supernova, feeding on snowmelt seeped through underground stone shelves. droplets hit small pools of transparent water—rippling, rippling, rippling.

 IV. Here You Are 

there is no other sound than water meeting water. of my breath caught in eternity. no other moment, no other reason needed to open my heart again. despite impending endings, some jewels emerge in unlikely places; create a motivation to keep traveling bumpy side roads, to keep going no matter how and despite obstructions. There will be moments like this—

don't despair any longer,

water will find you.