Poems by Craig Segall

Meow-Meow Studies Astronomy

by Craig Segall

From Canary Spring 2021

The Lower American River flows past, still wild, not far from Craig's home and garden. He spends his days trying to protect air quality while his wife Lilly restores salmon runs on the river; they both hope it runs clear and cool past the cottonwoods for years to come.

We are listening to Beethoven,
late morning fading to early afternoon,
on a sunlit Sunday at the start of spring.
The cat curls softly in her warm ray.

Eight minutes ago,
the vast plasma furnace of the sun,
all whorls and arcs of flame,
sent the roaring wind over a hundred million miles,
passed the swinging curves of the inner planets,
past the near-molten crags of Mercury, the acid
bath of Venus’s nightmare furnace,
to find her tufted ears.

She turns, a lesser satellite,
content in her orbit,
and presents
a warm belly to my hand.

© Craig Segall

Morning on the Cliffs, Bolinas

by Craig Segall

From Canary Spring 2021

Earthship, barely moored:

Past Olema, the chalk downs roll
their long cove-broken arc to the far point.
Spring rain sweeps in, clouds like sails
above the prow of the bluff where we wait,

Perched. This land follows the whales north.
Roots -- apple, oak, rock -- arc and strain;
erratic place riven down to its fern canyons,
wind sweeps past the mounded iris blooming.

No turning from the long dissolving journey, the salt dark.

Still: We have come from a warm farm kitchen where we woke
to rain on the window and the frogs trilling. Three dogs pile
on warm tile floors. Today, you are in your body and I am in my body.
The curve of the mug fits so well into the curve of my hand.

A sudden sweetness fills me, waking, walking these long low billows of land,
itself infirm, on the cliff edge crumbling to breaker, breaker, breaker.

Sly Park

by Craig Segall

From Canary Fall 2021

Standing on the bottom of a lake
half-way up the high Sierra;
a rime of gold leaves from bankside aspen,
are sunset clouds in the mirrored surface;

soft mud billows,
set spinning by the streamers of my breath rising.

I have seen this crenulated country unfold, spire on spire
from the high peaks in the sharp pine air,
canyon branch and lake glint,
and all the world turning.

Your heart would catch at the sweetness of it:
The light slanting down all the way to the Pacific.

Under those shining lakes, those bright sun-dancing waters,
granite caught and forest kept,
this long gray plain of bone dust, this cold and cloistered silence.