Monday, January 04, 2021

1059. Abbott's Lagoon - Robert Hass

.

The first thing that is apt to raise your eyes

Above the dove-grey and silvery thickets

Of lupine and coyote bush and artichoke thistle

On the sandy, winding path from the parking lot

To the beach at Abbott’s Lagoon is the white flash

Of the marsh hawk’s rump as it skims low

Over the coastal scrub. White-crowned sparrows,

Loud in the lupine even in October, even

In the drizzly rain, startle and disappear.

The brush rabbits freeze, then bolt and disappear,

And the burbling songs and clucks of the quail

That you may not even have noticed you were noticing

Go mute and you are there in October and the rain,

And the hawk soars past, first hawk, then shadow

Of a hawk, not much shadow in the rain, low sun

Silvering through clouds a little to the west.

It’s almost sundown. And this is the new weather

At the beginning of the middle of the California fall

When a rain puts an end to the long sweet days

Of our September when the skies are clear, days mild,

and the roots of the plants have gripped down

Into the five-or six-month drought, have licked

All the moisture they are going to lick

From the summer fogs, and it is very good to be walking

Because you can almost hear the earth sigh

As it sucks up the rain, here where mid-October

Is the beginning of winter which is the beginning

Of a spring greening, as if the sound you are hearing

Is spring and winter lying down in one another’s arms

Under the hawk’s shadow among the coastal scrub,

Ocean in the distance and the faintest sound of surf

and a few egrets, bright whits, working the reeds

At the water’s edge in October in the rain.