One of the listeners beckoned me to an empty boulder near him.

It was on sultry day much like today that I followed a path into Cold Creek Canyon Preserve to hear William Harris and a small group of friends read poetry under the spell of cascading water.

Harris was once a part owner of Papa Bach’s Bookstore, that much-loved Westside institution where, some time ago, draft counseling and underground verse were dispensed along with the latest from the best-seller list.

Papa Bach’s didn’t survive the ‘80s. Its once-Bohemian loft now taken over by the inventory of The Writers’ Computer Store, Harris has found an alternate poetic venue in the Santa Monica Mountains and occasionally leads a walk there. His next will be a summer solstice reading on June 21.

The setting is a small perennial stream that trickles from springs south of Calabasas on a circuitous route toward Malibu.

A plot of 545 acres containing the headwaters of Cold Creek was acquired for back taxes by the Nature Conservancy and deeded in 1984 to the Mountains Restoration and Trust, a nonprofit group dedicated to keeping Cold Creek just as it is.

The trust also maintains a nature center nearby on a flatter parcel called Stunt Ranch. Having spent the morning there with a group of people training to be docents, I was a few minutes late for the poetry walk.

Starting through an inconspicuous gate on Stunt Road about a mile from Mulholland Highway, I pressed up a densely wooded trail wondering how I would find a circle of poets in the wilderness. My answer soon became apparent when I heard a deep, melodious voice echoing through the canyon.

I spotted several white shirts through the leaves and climbed over boulders to reach them.

Harris stood at the head of the group on a large granite boulder where the water splashed beside his feet over the edge. He held a book in his hand and read skillfully, with an actor’s voice.

Two women and two men occupied other boulders upstream from Harris, forming an intimate amphitheater. Waving a switch that he was using to brush flies away, one of the listeners beckoned me to an empty boulder near him.

When Harris finished his poem, a young woman read several pieces from a large volume.

One was “The Death of a Moth,” an essay by Virginia Woolf. It described in minute detail the dying agony of a moth that struggled insistently to survive.

“Very interesting, the ambivalence she showed in the essay, between the affirmation of life and the affirmation of death,” Harris said when it was done.

The two men had nothing to offer, so Harris resumed, slipping into prose long enough to read two Indian legends from the book, “Who Shall Be the Sun?” by David Wagoner.

The first, “Why Coyote Only Howls at Night,” told how Coyote, whose three cubs strayed from the den and died in the sun, sought revenge. For several mornings, Coyote went to the spot and lunged at the rising sun so menacingly that it went back down. Taking alarm, the villagers warned Coyote that their crops would fail and the rivers would freeze. Coyote relented.

“The people lived,” Harris read. “But Coyote remembered. He sings now only at the moon.”

The second piece told how whales were made.

“The Chumash, like most Indian groups, believed that they were the first inhabitants of the Earth,” Harris said. “They also believed that they originated on Santa Cruz Island some 20 miles off the coast.

“To release them from the congested islands, their gods created a rainbow bridge to the mainland. But, when the islanders walked over the bridge, some fell off. They became whales. And, each year after that, they swam close to land.

“These are the Chumash relatives hoping to catch sight of one of their family,” Harris said.

Finally, Harris unfolded a paper on which was typed a poem of his own.

“I guess this is my famous poem, because somebody paid me for it,” he said. “I think they paid me $175, which doubled my lifetime earnings from poetry.”

It was about climbing Morro Rock.

Like Virginia Woolf’s essay, it ended with ambivalence about life and death when the two climbers fall.

We sprawl together in the sky / linked to rock on a finger of steel / The bolt bends creaks pops out / then all the loose stitching of rope and steel / unravels from the rock opening the air beneath us. / I have a dream sometimes / of falling and never stopping / it doesn’t hurt until it is over. . . / and you know that Galileo was right / and falling is not the worst / and if you climb high enough you will fall and never stop falling.”

Everyone stayed silent for a moment.

Then someone asked if Harris based the poem on his own experience.

Only partly, he said. He was a fervid rock climber several years ago until the day he had the experience the poem was based on.

It happened at Stoney Point, a favorite climbing spot in Chatsworth. He was only an observer.

“I heard someone I could not see on the face of the rock,” Harris said. “I heard all the pitons come out like a zipper. I haven’t climbed since.”

The reading was over. Harris then led a short expedition up the canyon, over slippery boulders, to a waterfall. It was an easy climb, well worth the risk.