Remembering
Steve Abbott
Dan Calder
Doug Carter
Gerry Coletti
William Dickey
Martin Fleischer
Ron Garner
Don Gillis
Jay Hayes
Jim Holloran
Ross Marbury
Michael Rubin
George Stambolian
Steve Steinberg
Shelby Topp
Deb Watkins
Doug Wolfe
and David Glenn Luke Matt Steve Tomàs and Wayne
Long before it started people had claimed the land
from the dead below San Francisco whose bodies
were re-buried in Colma. New storms have blown the sand
off broken tombstones from the last two centuries
that - like discarded manhole covers ruined pediments
dug up foundations concrete slabs - were tossed
for breakwater on the beach. The sea never relents.
Every few years it exposes the names of the lost.
This morning two gulls fell on the Embarcadero dead
white plump unbloodied. Their fellows overhead
circled and keened their looping bodies dawn bright
clouding the blue sky wings flapping as in a rite
their cries like rhymes as the tides take form from regrets
and mourning is the wind that blows through sonnets
Peter Weltner has published five books of fiction including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays three poetry chapbooks three collaborations with the artist Galen Garwood most recently Water's Eye and three full length collections of poems News from the World at My Birth: A History The Outerlands and To the Final Cinder the latter two from Brickhouse Books. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and journals and several national anthologies including two O. Henry's in 1993 and 1998. A graduate of Hamilton College and Indiana University he taught for thirty seven years at San Francisco State University. He and his husband Atticus Carr live in San Francisco steps away from the Pacific.
"TO THE FINAL CINDER captures what it is to be human. It is a humane poetry without artificiality a poetry that accepts without reservation the whipsaw of joy and pain we all must live through. Despite its title there are no cinders here but live coals glowing with life." -Bradley R. Strahan editor Visions International author of This Art of Losing.
"Formal. Beautiful. Tough. Intricate. Musical. In love with language and music. Romantic. Strong. Homoerotic. Intelligent. Excellent. Flowing. Tight. Descriptive. Narrative. Emotional. Internal world of memory and imagination. Dedication. Serious. Dedication to beauty. Meaning. Formal. Excessive. Glamorous. Finds love and passion in the sea hunger in dust. Urgent. Moral. Difficult. Strong and painful. Loss. Beauty rescues. Desire. Symphonic. Sad. Ambitious. Large and brave. I feel breath­less and sad that the world I live in doesn't care or is avoiding the size scale bounty moral rigor and passion of our lives that can be found here." -Linda Gregg author of All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems