Poems by Rafaella Del Bourgo

Dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, 1987

by Rafaella Del Bourgo

From Canary Fall 2020

Rafaella lives between the coastal hills and the San Francisco Bay with her husband and one spoiled cat. Along the back of their property line, a row of Italian cypresses plays host to birds and squirrels. Underneath this urban neighborhood runs Potter Creek.

In lazy circles they cruise the shallows,
heads up, hungry for the air,
and, maybe, for the sight of land.

One slides along my legs and
when I reach down to stroke her rubbery skin,
she smacks her tail like a cranky aunt
tired of company already.

A nudge behind my knees
and here is another with a fish in his mouth.
I take it gingerly, avoiding his white picket teeth
and, glad the fish is dead,
caress the animal’s warm flank,
read the billboard near the high-tide mark:
If a dolphin gives you a fish. Keep it. Returning a fish
is bad manners.

One dolphin swims to a yellow lab
standing up to his chest
in cool blue ocean.
The dolphin pushes her beak into the dog’s black nose,
rubs her face against coarse fur.
A woman on shore calls, “Magic, Magic,”
but the dog does not move.

The dolphins gather
wearing their grins,
then swim west and disappear from sight.
The dog and I stare after them,
the fish, a cold and slippery weight
in my hand.

© Rafaella Del Bourgo

Eli the Lamb,
Lower Longley, Tasmania

by Rafaella Del Bourgo

From Canary Fall 2019

Monday morning, the parents at work,
two boys at school, Eli kicks down
one side of his pen,
arrives to rear up and clack, clack, clack
on my kitchen door.

I take my knitting outside,
sit on the sun-warmed boards of the back porch.
Our black cat curls in a basket
of colored balls of yarn.
Eli, brambles in his white coat,
heaves a most unsheep-like sigh,
lies down, head in my lap.

Before supper,
the ten-year old will come rushing into the yard.
Could I have my lamb, please?
stretching his skinny boy arms into the dusk.
I will heft Eli onto my right hip,
take the boy’s hand, trudge up the mountain
where Eli will be left,
penned up once again in solitude.

But right here, right now,
in a nearby blue gum,
galahs have stopped their screeching,
preen pink feathers in the filtered light.

And, peering from around the woodshed,
a family of grey kangaroos
completes this moment of grace:
black cat in a basket,
fat lamb with his head on my lap,
the wool blanket I’m knitting
partly covering his face.

© Rafaella Del Bourgo

Puerto Don Juan

by Rafaella Del Bourgo

From Canary Spring 2020

Silence in the cockpit of our sailboat.
Dawn bleaches Baja mountains,
pale now as our chamomile tea,
the buttered muffins on our plates.
We list to port,
stuck fast into the bay’s bottom
when the ten-foot tide swept out
as we slept.

In the deeper blue,
brown pelicans and gannets
continue diving.
All through the night,
splashing in moonshine,
they had worked for fish.
They never stopped.

A coyote, belly swollen with pups,
ventures onto wet sand,
sniffs our anchor line,
and, now just a few feet from us,
the acrid metal of outboard motor.

At the click of my camera,
she’s running fast,
up the trail – a canyon between ridges –
where hundreds of coyotes come down
to search for food along the shore,
a floundering mackerel, perhaps,
or, closer to town,
an unlucky cat, a small dog.

We hide from the blistering sun,
read, doze, wait for late afternoon
when the tide’s return will lift us
and we can sail away.

Last year one local told us
she fell asleep in the shade of her palapa,
woke to find a large male coyote
nuzzling her toes.
When asked how these animals get fresh water,
she said they lick morning cacti,
survive on dew collected from
between the spines.

© Rafaella Del Bourgo

Tasmanian Cats

by Rafaella Del Bourgo

From Canary Summer 2020

When we arrive for our year in Tasmania, we borrow Renta Cat from a city friend to rid our country house of mice. She quickly does the job. Her reputation spreads. The postmistress across the road tells everybody in the village of Lower Longley.

The dairy farmer from up the mountain comes to borrow her, though I say I cannot guarantee performance. He returns her with tales of an animal run amuck -- seven small deaths in just one hour. Me and the missus, he says, most grateful. Gave her a dish of cream.

Often we wake to marsupials on the back deck. Very dead. Always decapitated. We try to match the wet and bloody carcass to the photos on our “Marsupials of Tasmania” poster on the kitchen wall – possums, bandicoots, and quolls. We try to imagine hopping or scuttling. The shape of ear and snout.

Also on the poster, our favorite, the Tasmanian tiger. About twice a year, someone calls the Launceston Museum, says, I’ve seen one but I won’t tell you where. Seventy pounds with a rear-facing pouch, considered a threat to the introduced sheep, the tiger was hunted to extinction with dogs and guns.

The creatures Renta brings us are small, often babies. One of us lifts the limp body to give it a formal burial among the other graves we’ve marked with painted stones. We try not to think about the frantic mother left behind. We try not to think about what we will find next week. As we dig the hole, Renta sits near the corpse and grooms herself.

It is mid-morning. We stand, heads bowed, then return to the house for brown bread and butter, and jam from the English blackberries growing out of control along the south fence.

© Rafaella Del Bourgo

The Inexplicable Business of Fish

by Rafaella Del Bourgo

From Canary Fall 2020

Hiking the train tracks
between Bangkok and Chiang Mai,
I observe
a walking catfish,
eighteen inches long.
Not scalloped and iridescent
but black, dull;
his skin absorbs the light.
Crawling out of his rice paddy
of green wands
and silver water,
he propels himself on fins
ribbed and stout,
flat as the full moon
in the morning sky.
Dust coats his belly
and throat
as he muscles slowly
up the incline,
twenty feet
to the tracks,
hauls himself
over one rail
then another.
He lifts his head
to eat the air
one last time,
then, six pulls and a slide,
he spills into the rice paddy
on the other side
and disappears.
I shift my pack,
continue north
toward emerald trees,
pewter clouds.
A light rain
embroiders my hair.

© Rafaella Del Bourgo