The bay widens and welcomes
more light onto the road.
It’s all silver, and then
back into the conifer greens and blues,
the silt-brown rain-swollen creeks,
moss-mottled alders, windless
ponds and their nibbling geese.

And the memory of arriving,
driving in the other direction, toward
the city where the kids would be born.
I’m not leaving—I’m returning,
to the beginning of who I’ve become,
the beginning of this long rainy season,
its leaks in the roof and walls,

mist-walking in the mud of the creek
in the shadows of the ravine, small hands
in my hands. Those young
who arrived through the body of the one
woman I married, they’ve flown
out of the rain. I’m still arriving.
The bay is quiet over the oysters . . . .