SCU’s own lecturer, Rebecca Black, publishes her first book of poems.
The gospel
of that summer
was to walk and watch
for hours the strands
of a spider web
disbanding,
our conversations spinning
like gossamer
in the air over
Pescadero Creek.
I thought the origin
of our favorite word
might begin in the Latin
for sea or bone,
os or mare,
but in the beginnings
of gossamer
were so many goose-summers
spent sleeping in shade
under pine or cypress
back east before the floods
before the love
of words replaced love,
the idea of a you
swamping
the idea of me.
Always the rain
and sometimes a letter
in the afternoons,
the orange mutt
tunneling under
the wire. A spider web
the entire known galaxy—
those summers
which will not
come back to me.
—Rebecca Black
