Afterwards Whether they be high or low, the future Seas will wash shores somewhere, shelves of shale Wear and crack, sandstone dissolve to dunes, Crustaceans scuttle … New Poems reflects on the state of our planet. It explores insights from Pascal, Euler, Feynman and other physicists, and anatomizes spiritual epiphanies. These excursions join poems about the lives of immigrants and refugees, and the paradoxes of how they settled on Native American lands once claimed by conquistadores. California’s arid valleys, deserts, and coastal bluffs frame many of these portraits, as does the often-imperiled endurance of California’s oaks. Music, meaning, and meter are married in poems that employ blank verse, sonnets, canzone, and other forms bound by the structure of rhyme and rhythm.