Poems by Robert Coats
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Colossal Wreck
“Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
by Robert Coats
From Canary Spring 2021
Bob lives in the watershed of Blackberry Creek, a small urbanized but partially-restored tributary of San Francisco Bay. He may also be found occasionally in the Tahoe basin, where he is studying the impacts of climate change.
We thought our “Shining City on the Hill”
would last forever.
With our missiles and megatons
no foe could defeat us,
certainly not a tiny microbe.
What a pleasure it was
to hop on a plane to Paris,
hear the engines roar,
feel their thrust pressing us
back into our deep seats.
And every year,
a new shiny 4X4 with knobby tires
and such a nice smell inside.
Gas was cheap, and what a thrill
to rip across the empty desert.
Then: fields of withered corn,
towns consumed in firestorms
or washed away.
In the lobby of the Miami Marriott,
the marble floor decorated
with barnacles and plastic flotsam.
© Robert Coats
Compass Points
by Robert Coats
North was toward
the creek of mossy rocks
leafy forest of sycamore,
shaggy hickory and tulip poplar.
South, the Potomac,
its algal fishy smell,
sandy banks, wheeling gulls
and fat gasping catfish.
East, the glow of dawn,
fields of blue phlox
wet with dew, the liquid
warble of a wood thrush.
West, the fiery sunset I watched
from the forbidden roof with neighbor kids,
pretending the bright cloud slivers
were flying saucers.
On a clear night of new-fallen snow
I found the Big Dipper,
the two stars that point to Polaris,
and found my place in the world.
© Robert Coats
Fruit Bats
by Robert Coats
From Canary Summer 2019
I thought they were crows
black wings flapping
flapping against the red sky,
then saw stubby tails,
clawed wings, and knew:
flying foxes!
I followed their screeching
to nearby gum trees,
watched them creep through the canopy,
vulpine faces snuffling white blossoms.
How did these creatures ever become
the stuff of nightmares and horror flicks?
Once they darkened the skies
over North Queensland,
setting off to forage
in fruited tracts of rainforest,
pollinating flowers, spreading seeds
in groves since burned for sugar cane.
At dawn they return
to squabble for a good perch,
hang upside down
wrapped in leathery wings.
Branches of eucalypts heavy
with furry dark fruit.
© Robert Coats
Music and Memory
by Robert Coats
From Canary Fall 2020
Working at my computer
barely listening to the streaming music.
A new piece begins: Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite,
solo flute and oboe taking turns,
notes falling, rising, falling again
then joined by a chorus of strings,
and suddenly I am in the Merced River basin,
sixteen again, bivouacked
with a friend on a rocky ledge
above timberline.
A rough night, not much sleep
on the gravelly bed.
Roused by the winds of dawn,
faint glow in the east,
we sit up to watch the sun
rise behind the Minarets,
a pink cloud-cap on Ritter and Banner,
the glacial moraine around us
aglow in orange morning light.
© Robert Coats
Pelagic Messengers
by Robert Coats
From Canary Fall 2011
First came the rays,
cruising the cove, wing-tips
flicking the air, spiky
tails jutting up.
Yesterday a dark speckled torpedo--
a three-foot Chinook on her way upriver--
lazed along the shoreline,
eyeing me as I ate lunch.
Today a smooth-hound shark
slipped in with snaky grace,
dorsal fin slicing the surface
to snuffle the high-tide sodden
salt grass at my feet.
Messengers from ocean and estuary
with news from their world of
diatoms, squid and crunchy clams,
of coastal up-welling and oceanic gyres.
News of changes
we have yet to imagine.
© Robert Coats
Rebellion of the Salinas
by Robert Coats
Dammed and diverted,
chattering kingfishers exiled,
floodplain furrowed to carbody-revetted banks
the River of Steinbeck trickles
between silt-choked pools, ammoniacal
nightmare of cladoceran agonies:
Aldicarb, Diazinon, Malathion.
Now high in the Santa Lucias
lowering clouds cloak dark peaks.
Slanting rain weaves gray veils
over the chaparral of the barrancas,
soaking the chamisales of the Nacimiento,
San Antonio, Tassajara
and the green shoulders of Soledad.
Runoff gathers in swales
surges the creeks and arroyos,
pulses the mainstem. Leaping overbank
the river nudges sandbags, concrete rubble,
braids delicate ribbons of sediment
across laser-leveled fields, cutting
new channels among the artichokes.
The flood recedes;
clean silt glistens in the pale sun.
At the river's new edge
in runes written
by a stalking heron:
seeds of willow
seeds of cottonwood.
Originally published in the Pudding House anthology Fresh Water--poems from the Rivers, Lakes and Streams
© Robert Coats
River in a Glass of Water
by Robert Coats
From Canary Summer 2019
In late summer, when reservoirs are low
the tap water carries
a faint fishy and algal smell.
My wife complains, but to me
it is the smell of the Potomac,
and the summers of my childhood.
The trail led downward through
patches of stinging nettle,
jewel-weed with juice to cool the sting,
through dark and humid woods,
willow thickets,
to the river’s sandy bank.
We’d hop from rock to rock
to reach mid-stream islands,
bait our hooks with fat worms,
to try for wriggling catfish.
In spring, shad in the millions
ran up the river.
And high overhead
gulls in great flocks
wheeled and mewled.
© Robert Coats
The Earth's Most Dangerous Predator
by Robert Coats
From Canary Spring 2012
Off Greenland,
ice-flow melting beneath his feet,
the bear heads southeast
through spume-flecked gray seas.
Days later, bone-tired and hungry,
he makes landfall at Skagafjordur.
Hauls out, goes shambling down
a country road, exploring his new home.
People gather to see him.
With fog descending,
no darts on hand, the police decide
to do what they do best.
You can watch the video:
the bear lumbers across talus,
alpine fells, pausing
to sniff the wind.
You hear the crack and echo of two shots,
see him lurch and stumble,
the blood-stained white fur,
vermillion congealing
in volcanic gravel beneath his neck.
The policeman’s hand, pulling back
a lip to show the fearsome
sharp teeth.
© Robert Coats
The Marshes at Dark Solstice
by Robert Coats
Now come the cold fogs of winter
when a seamless nickel sky
presses on the marshes
like long-forgotten sorrow
and a pale disk of sun
barely shows through by noon.
At bay's edge cormorants
perch on rotting wharves
black wings outstretched and dripping.
Dunlins huddle against the cold,
bills beneath wings
awaiting the turning of the tide.
In such marshes by a distant northern sea
my ancestors plied sloughs in punts
snaring widgeons, trapping eels
then hunkered by peat fires in smoky huts,
bleary-eyed and dour, cursing the laird
while they waited for dawn.
Tonight I ply a scarlet river,
tail-lights stretching into the dark’s descent
but still hear the mudhen's cackle
tide's whisper, and soft
scuttle of scavenging crabs.
Tomorrow there’ll be solace
in the stalking grace of the egret,
ruby eye of the grebe,
falcon's stoop
and the clean southwest
wind of an oncoming storm.
© Robert Coats