Along the Gaviota coast

By Chris Clarke on 2009 09 30 at 7:01:51 pm

Along the Gaviota coast the sea
is calm, expectant, and the lowering sun
raises gray shades to interlace each tree
as if of winter’s silken webs was spun
this scandent fog. Lace tight this splintered wood;
bind well this sundered, weather-riven bole,
split to the heart. I had misunderstood,
beguiled by placid sun, how great a toll
this shore imposes. Here above the strait,
this soul as fractured as a cypress, all
my nature’s angels thus adjudicate
and find me wanting. Here before the fall
I watch the sun despond, the breeze abate,
the past come to a close, the end, that’s all.

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About me

I'm a natural history and environmental writer, an editor and photographer. I've lived in upstate New York, the SF Bay Area, Washington, DC, the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles. My writing has appeared in publications ranging from Camas and Orion to Bay Nature, California Wild, the Boston Globe, and about thirty daily papers nationwide when I was a syndicated garden writer for the Knight-Ridder chain. No, I never got to meet the talking car.

I've traveled extensively in the Mojave, Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, as well as in the steppes and slickrock country of the Colorado Plateau.

About Coyote Crossing

This blog has existed in one form or another since 2003. At first it was called Creek Running North, after Pinole Creek, near where I lived back then. I moved in 2008 and renamed the site Coyote Crossing, but about a thousand people* still link here under the old name.

My publicist tells me I should mention that my writing here has frequently been called the best on the Internet.

* May not actually equal 1000

Banner painting by Carl S. Buell.

Coyote Crossing

Writing and photography from the Mojave and Sonoran deserts by Chris Clarke

Along the Gaviota coast

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