Saving the Bay

When I telephoned a friend, her husband told me
She’s not here tonight, she’s out saving the Bay.
She is sitting and listening in committee chambers,
Maybe speaking, with her light voice,
From the fourteenth row, about where
The birds and fish will go if we fill in the Bay.

The fish, she says, include starry flounder,
Pacific herring, rockfish, surfperches.
And the flat fish who come to the spawning flats
In the shallow waters near the narrow shores.
The shadow-look you know, the fish shooting
In that light green shallow, a dark arrow.

Otherwise we will get a bowling alley,
A car park and golf course with financing.
Sift up the shallows into a solid base
With sand dredged from the deeper channels, brought in scows
Or hopper dredges, and dumped on the fish, and then paved over
For recreation with no cost to the city.

And so we hear the sides, the margins speaking:
To allow the Commission in the public interest
Permits for the recovery of sand and gravel
From the submerged tidelands of the state,
Fill of unlimited quality, clean sand
Replenished by the southern littoral drift;

Or yet, Dear Sirs: Your bill flies in the face
Of the U.S. Army Engineers’ Barrier Study,
The Delta Study, Transportation Study,
Even the Petroleum Institute plan for bringing freighters
And hundreds of workers in to Contra Costa
To boat, bathe, drink, and return these waters.

A student I remember said to me, My mother
Wants me to be a banker, but I want to be
A sanitary engineer, spending all that money
Back toward the sea. Do you think it’s possible?
See how these hills shape down back of the college
In summer streaked with little dry arroyos,
In winter running over, rush and freshet,
Through storm drains, cellars, sometimes parlors, straight away
Down to the sea. Think of the veins
Of this earth all flowing raining water,
The drove of rivers in the pipes we’ve laid.

Effluent, said my student, there’s a word.
Give me a choice between it and debris
And any day I’d choose effluent.
Cover and fill is bleach and burn, with tires
Sticking up out of the muck, and loads
Of old brush and tree branches crisping away there.
Not for me. I like the purest water
Sparkling green under a soil, and it can breeze
Out of our pipes and chemicals, lucent as
The rain itself, around the bodies
Of fish and swimmers.

Saving the bay,
Saving the shoals of day,
Saving the tides of shallows deep begun
Between the moon and sun.

Saving the sidings of the Santa Fé.
Saving the egret and the herring run,
Cane and acacia, mallow and yarrow save,
Against the seventh wave,

Boundary and margin, meeting and met,
So that the pure sea will not forget,
Voracious as it is, its foreign kind,
And so the land,

Voracious as it is, will not redeem
Another’s diadem.
Saving the shores,
Saving the lines between,

Kelp, shrimp, and the scrub green,
Between the lap of waters
And the long
Shoulder of stone.

Therein, between, no homogeneous dredge,
But seedy edge
Of action and of chance
Met to its multiple and variable circumstance.

Though a news column says that Aquatic Park is a police headache,
In the past year, eighty-seven arrests
Of characters for crimes better not talked about,
That the lake is a favorite dumping spot for hot safes,
Burglary tools, stripped bikes, even a body,

Yet a notice says, Next week at Aquatic Park,
The V-Drive Boating Club holds its annual race —
Everybody comes out for this event —
These are the world’s fastest boats, faster than hydros,
Needing the quiet water the embankment provides.

And a letter from a statistician, fond of the facts,
Compares the use of Aquatic Park with the Rose Garden: the same pattern;
Fewest people, about five each, on a Friday of terrible weather,
Next, about fifty, on a warm Wednesday afternoon,
Most, a hundred and Fifty on a clear windy Saturday. Signed, sincerely.

Some live in the deeps, a freighter
Plying between here and Yokohama.
Some live in the rose gardens,
Deeps of a street, a two-storyed
Observer and participant, daily
Moving out into the traffic, back into it
Where curtains billow in their breakfast room.
The deeps. Some
Live in the margins. Have they the golden mean?

Freight whistles reach here and the fire engines
Coming from town, foundry hammers
Among the wash of waves.
Kelp drifts them up afloat, and suddenly
They are in the tinder world of lizards.
Cut ashore they bask and breathe
And then plunge back
Down the long glints that take their weight.
At home. At home. But which?

Likely a sea captain will live in a margin
But never wants to, wants a deep molded farm;
Likely an architect, but mainly weekends.
On the weekdays, along the bay margin
Little happens, small objects
Breed and forage. Flights come in and vanish.
Solicitudes entail solicitudes.
Dredge the channel, reinforce the seawall
And we shall have deep calling to deep directly.

She starts to speak, my friend in her light voice,
Of margins: marshes, birds, and embarcaderos.
Truths spread to dry like nets, mended like nets,
Draw in at the edges their corruptions,
To let the moving world of bay and town
Mingle, as they were amphibian again.

Saving the bay. Saving the blasted bay.
That there be margins of the difference,
Scrap heap and mobile, wind ridge and ledge,
Rockfish and silverside, channel and tide,
Mud and debris. That there be
Shore and sea.