Sutro Bath Ruins

Wind whips up sea’s salt
and scrubs it against the headlands.
Not all that cling to this coast remain.

Broken rock jagged to still pools,
a wall follows their limit
like the remains of an ancient fortress.

Against whom did it defend? Monsters? Men?
Boys want to know. Boys chase their eyes down stairs,
cut left to narrow foundational

barricade and run barely missing
over jutting metal spars whose purpose
long ago ceased from the plan of what was.

They run up stairs that stop empty. There!
Look there! Another wall’s crumbling end
elevates them to gaze out from the stone

finger stretched tall pointing above waves
at soft junctions of blue sky and fog.
Boys scramble down to the cove, the younger

following the older. Boys are brothers
alive in the mystery of what was.
They have no inkling of the opulence

they now tread under foot, just as the
opulent had no notion of the wealth
their ruin would create in the palace

of imagination, nor what comfort
those unknown seas would carry deep into
the balm of memory. Boys are brothers.

Once they stood above the unknown and then
the unknown drove them down and then through and
in the end the unknown became the end.

For not all that cling to this coast remain,
as the wind here testifies everyday.