To the Final Cinder

Remembering Steve Abbott Dan Calder Doug Carter Gerry Coletti William Dickey Martin Fleischer Ron Garner Don Gillis Jay Hayes Jim Holloran Ross Marbury Michael Rubin George Stambolian Steve Steinberg Shelby Topp Deb Watkins and... Long before it started, people had claimed the land from the dead below San Francisco whose bodies were re-buried in Colma. New storms have blown the sand off broken tombstones from the last two centuries that like discarded manhole covers, ruined pediments, dug up foundations, concrete slabs were tossed for breakwater on the beach. The sea never relents. Every few years, it exposes the names of the lost. This morning, two gulls fell on the Embarcadero, dead, white, plump, unbloodied. Their fellows overhead circled and keened, their looping bodies, dawn bright, clouding the blue sky, wings flapping as in a rite, their cries like rhymes, as the tides take form from regrets and mourning is the wind that blows through sonnets