What is it About Grace

A little poem, written a moon ago, about grace, about life, about the land I love, Point Reyes. 

What is it about grace—

how it comes down upon you

in the form of a sunrise

over the green knuckles

of Black Mountain, a lick of peach

across the bay, then all at once

the whole star, balanced there

at the edge and rising, how in

that moment you know 
that you are watching the earth 

move.

Yes. That should be enough to bring

you to your knees, but then there are

the woodpeckers, laughing, and

the robins, calling, and the light coming in

on the wooden walls, on the man you love,

sleeping—

 

but what is it about grace

which is also the silver body of a gray

squirrel at the bottom of the hill,

one leg crushed in the middle of

the road called Sir Francis Drake,

how she is staring from great black

eyes and writhing to get up

but you know she will never get up again,

and what is grace if not also mercy?

How can you leave her there in the road

to be flattened a dozen more times

before lunch? What is this world,

with the bodies of animals crushed

into its roads like old shoes?

It doesn’t feel like grace

when you, shaking, turn the car

around and come back

knowing it will be her swiftest death

knowing you have no knife, no hammer

to finish her fast. It doesn’t feel like grace,

the small thump under the wheel, how dying

her whole silver tail waves like a banner

three times before it’s still.

You roll her out of the road with two sticks.

Her body is perfect and limp, save the

red bloom of her head. She is silver and clean

as a moon, setting behind Black Mountain

in the daylight. You cover her in hanging moss

and wild vetch and say words

for her squirrel soul and it feels like grace

her final peace, that she suffered less

than she might have

and yet she stays there in you

later when, at the edge of the world

with the man you love, at the edge of the world

where you can see the gray whales

swimming south to Baja, there is a tiny beach

far below where mother elephant seals have come

and given birth to wrinkled babies, dark as

silt, with velvet skins that bunch up around their

necks, just like big coats.

They are lounging;

no other word for it

babies nosing their mother’s bellies for milk,

sweeping sand up on their bodies with their flippers

to cool down the sun which rose over

Black Mountain and will set in the sea.

Nothing can touch them here, only

the sun, and the edges of the

lace long tide, coming and going.

In all of this grace, and the whole impossible

span of the ocean, and the cliffs of Point Reyes

a great curving bowl, a great long arm,

the great journeys of elephant seal, and whale

there is also the gray squirrel,

who didn’t make it across the street

this morning

and how impossibly lustrous

her silver tail.

-Inverness, February 2015