At The Lookout

Poetry By Michael Satris & CNF by Marthine Satris

Not a single surfer

at any of the breaks:

The Drift, The Channel,

The Groin, The Ramp, The Patch

    This flood tide

but 17 pelicans

    here and there flying

    effortlessly gliding

    over all of it

There’s a road called Overlook, but this is not about that. You turn down Terrace off Overlook, and halfway down, past the eucalyptus & ivy overrun creek/ditch/canyon, there’s a bulge south in the cliff and road, a blind curve and space to park your Dodge.

This is a cliff where locals meet, passing on foot and bike and scraping by in cars. It’s where the surfers block traffic on a barely two lane road but it’s fine, just say hi to folks you know and wait.

At some point, after earliest memories, someone formalized it with a couple of 2x4s at right angles to be a bench on the ocean side of the guard rail. (I told this from memory, and then when I next walked home from downtown, there was nothing there at all but a steel arching barrier. I made that a seat to see. Dissolving cliffs and a view of the fog, and this body, post-perched listening to waves liquifying the sky.)

A place unmarked -- a watching altar, a place to go see the waves and the neoprene waiters, feel the wind, to decide if going downtown is worth the hassle. It’s a ceremony, everyone coming to measure themselves against the time and sea.

The naming of the breaks -- I love a list -- it is complete and it’s a map, but not for strangers. Mike’s drawing a line, you see, from South to North, and when his pen gets bunched up at the end of the second line on the paper, I know what he means to say because the marine territory may not belong to me, but I belong to it.

On the downslope to home, the biggest ocean in the world is cupped between forest hills, held as a triangular gift and greeting. I do not surf, swimming is a panic. I let the waves lick, I run into the water and duck under, feet unsteady in sand. He was of it. His salted, sandy body and wet hair and beard. The top down drives South on Hwy 1, eyes always on the waves with sickening swerves back toward land.

As the poem begins, I think it will be a surfer’s lament -- shitty waves. He invokes and revokes a litany: not there, not there, not there.

But the poem opens and soars as he catches our eye in the volta on who is there. Overlooked. The brown pelicans. Look at them, all 17.

In his teenaged years in LA, back in the ‘60s, this bird that kinks its wings and neck and skims above our waves only to bail like a pilot shot down and crash land cannonball into the water, swallow fish and bob back up, a dinghy afloat and then, with one elevator wing pump, take off again -- can you see it, lofting into flight from a watery seat? -- that bird was dying. We’d efficiencied it for farmers and lawns to near extinction. I learned that story again last year -- our changes never stop but seep, climbing into gullet and eggs.

What forgiveness it is, to see them now, shadows rippling north over rocks and sand.

How long will our reprieve last, when bucking marine temperatures push anchovy torrents to deep dive toward cool, and brown feathered bodies are skeletal and beached this year, in flocks, in droves, unable to cantilever skyward on mouthfuls of air. Conjugate to die in the continuous: was dying, will be dying.

The name for the ocean coming in to you, seeping and sprawling and lifting itself higher is flood tide -- I had to look that up. What does it tell to name this? That it could just keep coming? Somebody makes tidebooks every year for just these beaches, to mark the ranging waves. I could buy one now, try to learn the patterns of ocean’s breath rising & how the planet spins under the swell that tries to reach the moon.

No prognosis of sesh,  but standing so still that all other movement startles. Michael biked up Terrace past the overlook on his last ride toward home. Did he stop there? Almost certainly. Here it is again, at night:

Another look out

the lookout, crab

boats ringing the horizon

Orion leaping overhead

Habit weathers to ritual when once becomes another and I find us on the mark sharing if not the same time, space, with our same turn, all of our eyes marking the breaks from South to North again: The Drift, The Channel, The Groin, The Ramp, The Patch.

On Agate, the next beach north, I turned my chin and eyes up to see brown pelicans skeining out, a real raveling. We walked back in along the creek and out of the wind, stopped by, saw friends -- their house will fall into the ocean some day coming soon -- and in the garden on the cliff looked west. The pelicans were still flocking north, still skimming the land’s edge, crowned in coyote brush and sunlight.

My eyes saw, and his, here on an unknown day and year, but the same season:

The line of 

several pelicans

hanging high just

over the cliffs

nothing less than that

was magnificent

as it headed north

   against/no

w/ the wind

blowing the fog in

so hard.

I came back again, I come back still. I look out, up. Winged and beaked shapes, dark and shadowing the cliff. Turn. Follow.

At the overlook, among echium and pampas; on Agate between cliff and rocky reef -- we are there, lookouts horizonward. Once as ever. And there are those seabirds, another again, another for now, whose wings hold them still on great bouts of wind, between him and me and the water, buoyed and northbound.

MARTHINE SATRIS is Associate Publisher at Heyday, the nonprofit book publisher in Berkeley focused on nonfiction, where she particularly emphasizes acquiring books about California's natural world and our relationship to it. She studied Irish experimental poetry at UC Santa Barbara and received a PhD in English in 2012. Ms. Satris grew up on the California coast and lives in Oakland with her family. Her prose and poetry has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Flyway Journal, Zyzzyva, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

MICHAEL SATRIS (1950-2020) was a defense attorney, a surfer, and a poet. His book of poetry Signs of Bolinas was published by Smithereens Press. He was the co-founder of the Prison Law Office and worked for the rights and liberation of all people caught in the carceral system. He lived in Bolinas, California.