Two Poems by Stephen Barile

by Stephen Barile

Pa' Ashi

(‘big water’ in Yokut language)

The end of the world came

when the sky turned black,

the sun eradicated.

A roar overtook the ear,

flapping wings by the billion;

millions upon millions

of geese, ducks, grebes, loons,

swans, blue herons, egrets,

pelicans, and gulls,

taken to flight from the calm lake.

So expansive, the lake stretched

to the horizon like the sea.

In the east, the silhouette

of the Sierra Nevada range

rising above the mist

over the vastness of lowland water;

to the south, the Tehachapi mountains;

in the west, the Coast Range, 

seeming as close as the other shore.

A fresh and ephemeral lake

in the Southern San Joaquin Valley.

Named Pa’ashi, ‘big water’

in the Native Yokut language.

A hundred-miles long,

30-miles wide, east to west.

A breeze poured from the lake,

10-degrees cooler.

Prevailing winds, North/Northwest,

blew for days.

The entire lake moved,

leaving one shoreline muddy,

while flooding the other.

In its breadth, a shallow bowl

uniquely rich in catfish, steelhead,

trout, Chinook salmon, sturgeon,

Pa’ashi perch (now extinct),

lake clams and freshwater mussels,

Western pond turtles,

(used in making turtle soup

for Barbary Coast fine restaurants),

otter, beaver, mink, muskrat;

bitterns, rails, coots, and snipes.

Tule elk, antelope, and deer,

all bountiful on the shore.

Yokuts settled the lake basin

peaceably for 10,000 years,

found their lake and land seized

by Spanish explorers,

the first to burn villages,

cut down native oak trees.

Trappers from Oregon

brought disease: malaria,

smallpox killed 20,000 Natives.

Incomers ran cattle and hogs

on the lake shore,

trampled tule roots,

flattened the mussel beds,

Burned hundreds of acres of reeds,

dense thickets of dark willow,

extensive tule-fringe marshes.

The end finally arrived

when the lake died of thirst.

The inflow of tributaries ran dry,

sealed with damming the four rivers

for agricultural irrigation.

Shelter Cove

for Richard

On the venerable county road

trucks have beaten holes into,

twenty-five winding miles

in old-growth forest of the King Range,

Shelter Cove, at Point Delgada

off King Salmon Road.

A thrust of land, edge of the earth,

sea level, and tsunami territory.

A land in supplication to the sea.

Where the west wind whips the waves

onto the rocky coast, careens

over the airport and golf course.

A breakwater, vigilantly stacked boulders

sheltering the boat launch

and incline to the bottom of the cliff.

Suspended on a cable, a large pipe

from the Municipal fish-cleaning station

200-feet above the ocean,

hastening mercury contamination

emptying fish waste discharge into the sea.

The discharge-end feeding undone gulls,

pelicans, and other flying scavengers.

In the tide pools, anemone and moss.

High tide, a rusted engine block,

a Barr Marine V-8, released to the shore

from the fury of the sea and hostile fates,

dashed on a stone field of churned seaweed.

Fog rolls in as fast as it subsides

outward to the sea, only to reappear again

masking the passage of hours and days.

Morning, like a chrome wrench replicates

the color of the sky, blue meets fog,

and the Salmon return to the sea.