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Leaving Mendocino
Prartho Sereno

There’s nothing we can do
about the rogue wave of sadness
that nips at the heels of our happiest days.

One visit you wrote the good part
of a play; another, I painted
a brown bear’s face.

This time it was ravens.
You sketched them from the picnic bench
as they rode the updrafts
and cukalooed across the cliffs.

The only way home now
is to steer the switchbacks—
their yellowed fields
and strands of sycamore
hung with moss.

It’s a fog-banked Route One.
Late summer.
The pewter rim of the year
glints dim through the haze
as we dip together into the dark.

Once in a while I bird flits
through our sadness—turkey vultures
and hummers. Fenceposts, dairy cows,
and fishermen in knee-high boots
dragging buckets home.

A little later, almost without notice,
it will break. The way storms do
and renegade prisoners
and everything else.

But first, we must navigate the known—
these black butterflies and apparitions,
the cold pull of sorrow at our feet.

—
Prartho Sereno is the author of four prize-winning poetry collections, including, most recently, Indian Rope Trick (Blue Light Book Award, 2018), and her illustrated Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils. Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, CA, she taught poem-making to children in grades K through 12 as a California Poet in the Schools for over 21 years, and she currently teaches “The Poetic Pilgrimage: Poem-Making as Spiritual Practice” online.

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