Sonoma Stone Soup

On the beach I seize
a striated granite stone
ocean-sprayed a false salmon hue.
Worrying the bead like a Greek
I pocket it-- this komboloi
a fragment dragged from Baja
along a continental raft.

Around a bend I encounter a lone dark totem,
an igneous rock cairn
tucked in a coastal corner.
Each of its pieces a slick green
serpentine squeezed from the earth like a watermelon seed--
a message from the magma.


Farther along the cliff
eroding land deposits
golden sandstone shards, piling them in a bluff's crook.
A stony basketwoven wall
erected by some Goldsworthy
flows up from the rubble,
reaches round and embraces
the rugged decaying land.