For followers of the famous eagle pairing from California: the female Jackie recently passed away after two weeks of care in Ojai Raptor Center following an attack by subadults. Pictured above is her with her mate Shadow in 2022. Farewell, Jackie!

If, Ocean, you could grant, out of your gifts and dooms,

some measure, fruit or ferment for my hands,

I'd choose your distant rest, your brinks of steel,

your furthest reaches watched by air and night,

the energy of your white dialect

downing and shattering its columns

in its own demolished purity.

Not the last wave with its weight of salt

crumbles the coastline and produces

a truce of sand encircling the world:

but tugging gravity, the pull of force,

the far-flung potency of waters

and the still solitude replete with lives.

Time, no doubt, or brimming crucible

of movement, primal unity

that death has left unsealed, green viscerae

of all-consuming oneness.

Of the drowned arm which lifts the water drop

only a kiss of salt remains. A humid fragrance

of drifting flowers clings where humans

bathed along your shores. Your energy

appears to glide away unspent,

seems to return to its original rest.

The wave you part with,

bow of identity, starry feather,

was only foam when it fell to pieces

and returned to be born, unconsumed,

Your whole strength clambers back to its origins.

You surrender nothing but mangled spoils,

husks your carriage swept aside,

the rejects of your abundant labor,

the shreds of afterbirth.

Your statue throws its shadow beyond the furthest wave

Living and co-related like breast and garment

of a single being and the breaths he draws,

in the matter of light haled from the deep

meadows uplifted by the waves

create the naked membrane of the planet.

You fill your own being with your substance.

And fulfill the curvature of silence.

The cup trembles with your salt and honey,

the universal womb of waters,

and nothing is wanting in you, as in the flayed

Crater, the unpolished pit:

desolate summits, scars, adhesions,

protecting the mutilated air.

Your petals throb against the world,

your submarine crops tremble,

the smooth algae brood like a menace,

the schools navigate and propagate

and only the dead lightning of scales

rises to the thread of the fishing nets

a wounded market in the distance