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