Butano Ridge

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

Rebecca Black’s first book of poems, Cottonlandia, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2005. She is a lecturer in the SCU department of English.
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