Crab boats sheltering behind the Head
buck on their moorings
ride the winter swells
the fishermen begrudge the stormy weather
the crabs are happy
just to keep their shells

Taking my kayak out past Pilot Rock
I watch the orange sea stars
clinging fast
to the rock face as the waters rise
and fall with every wave
that rushes past

The clanging bell buoy's gloomy monotone
pierces the fog bank
warns of hidden shoals
steers the sailor homeward so that he
won't be the one
for whom the churchbell tolls

I spoke once with a fisherman whose boat
was drydocked now
he'd reached that last great shoal
he said he'd dreamed a golden skeleton
an image fit
for his immortal soul

He told me that in all the storms he'd weathered
he'd never lost a crewman
to the seas
and of all the memories he treasured
that knowledge gave his mind
the greatest ease

The lighthouse used to stand out on the Head
two hundred feet above
the ocean's rise
the keeper's log in eighteen eighty-nine
mentions "a sea of most unusual size"

That rose high up the rock face and put out
the lamp
now that was surely quite a "sea"
but it's the keeper's understated tone
speaks of a different sensibility

In younger years I used to climb the Head
with my friend Jesse Moon
good company
we'd listen to the sea lions in the distance
barking on their Flatiron rookery

Jesse's gone on before me
in my mind
his shade still walks the trail
he used to clear
as if in some imagined afterlife
he visits still the place
he held so dear

The Head gives shelter from prevailing winds
but south storms can wreak havok
piling boats
right up on the beach below the dock
tossing shoreward
anything that floats

Before the Spanish captain named the place
back in seventeen hundred seventy-five
the Yurok village had been there for centuries
they called it Tsurai
some are still alive

Whose grandparents remembered
the old ways
the language - mostly gone
but the songs last
I wonder by what name it will be known
in future ages
when our time is past