27 June 2018
When I get home I’ll see you there through the entry window, at the heart of the floor, sleep-watching the stairs, on watch for blurs through your cloudy cataracts, on watch for me in your dreams.
Category Archives: Verse
Point Loeb
Wandering down by the Point,
Navigating by dim window-light,
The winter waves chew on the sea rocks.
Night gusting, the west is black,
Bottomless.
Admiring Tor House there,
Nesting on her Indian fire-scar, embraced
Between twin property lines and
Hawk Tower perched proud on her shoulder,
You’d think she’d always been at
26 3 0 4 Ocean View Avenue,
or at least
Dropped there by a passing glacier —
But the stone lies
— or is it whispering,
The Wreck of the Farallon
Under the grey deep, the plains, canyons, peaks,
the flooded floor of the world rolls on to Laurentia,
pressing on the Farallon, plank, mast, and sail
out ahead on a black stone wave,
driving her under the buoyant earth,
caught in the undertow of her
sunken bow, sinking deeper,
ever deeper under the world,
compressed and cooked, her wet soul bleeds out,
hot and convecting, boils stone,
hollows out Pluto’s chambers,
mothers strata of generations
of volcanic boils, dead, young, and dying,
trembling in the California sun.
When the great sea-world strikes the land,
the submarine ridge is crushed,
her mid-seam ripped ajar,
her bow pulled into the earth,
stern slammed into the continent’s edge;
all the wreckage tangled in a heap.
Here and there, the demolition done,
the old world digested, the continental belly
heaves up; Pacifica, Laurentia knock and shear
in their tectonic intercourse; mountain roots
severed and sucked off in the wake,
the subterranean bone of dead volcanoes floats up,
breaks through the surface; and seaward, bits of bone
shattered and blended with the sea-bottom
sediments of eons, and mother’s clotted blood.
© 2016 Kaweah
Personality Disorders
Sam Barber, sitting in the redwood parlor playing Adagio
for Strings on the Steinway, and Una’s in the bathtub
running the cold tap with a pistol in her hand and a bullet
in her breast, her black broth bleeding out, making warm
curlicues all around her, an arm reaching out
for more sleeping pills.
Behind the piano, the door to the guest room is closed
for J.R. and his guest, romping on the deathbed
and I’m seasick on the heaving edge, looking out
the west window—the reaper in the surf.
Yeats, J.R.’s comrade is fog-white with age
and madness and running naked through the poppies
singing for the tatters in his coat and brandishing
Una’s best cleaver at the star-eyed tourists.
© 2016 Kaweah
Falco urbanus
“Jeffers is my God.” — Charles Bukowski
When the blades of the falcon’s
silhouette flash
Between the bright towers of the City
we rub our eyes.
Pigeons squat in gutters
on watch for shadows.
Not the ruddy-tailed buzzard
the poet lionized;
Bagger of rodents, wounded birds,
wayward fledglings,
Squats atop Tudor cottages and
unicorn castles;
The brute too clumsy to thread
a cypress hedge,
Hover above the moor, nosedive
from infinity.
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Rites of Disposal
When I’m finally done, when all
my smoldering embers go cold, put me away.
Clean me up, straighten me out, and put me in my box.
Take it up to that green landfill
where they dump such things
and label them with cut stones.
Find me a plot, dig me a hole.
Sow me deep like a pumpkin seed
that you don’t want to grow.
Cover me there with earth by the yard,
and if you must speak, be brief.
Inscription on Helicon
I have seen her now: seasoned with eternity,
simmers in her sky-cold sylvan pool, hard and white
as the waning moon and quartzite banks, the last softening
membrane of youth seared away in the slow forge of forever;
breast peppered with translucent constellations
when the sun breaks through the leaves.
No fleshy delicacy—even of the slightest young brides,
but the taut, radiant hide of an ageless queen,
Immortal virgin, so say they, but naught of docile innocence;
her purity: homicidal violence.
She it is who haunts the dread hinterland,
forbidden interior, wildland of man;
No love for the society of Olympus,
and no Earth Mother, more terrible
than any Aphrodite.
I have etched here these scars on this stone, scraped
as I hide, catching my breath, wrapping my wounds,
year over year, binding my bones,
to report that I have run this long,
even to the sacred springs on Helicon.
Not pious nor merciful, she makes sport of me still.
The hounds come.
Acteon
© 2015–16 Kaweah
Hotel Jericho
Lowcountry, maybe twenty
upstream miles from the Battery
and a few feet above the sea;
the gators and the blackwater
patiently flow, and you can just about
hear the ghost-song of the ivory bill
echo off the cypress knees.
On the south bank, the land
swells forty or so feet
to lanky yellow pine stands
and narrow Old Jacksonboro Road,
holding to the rim till a finger
of the Caw Caw points to where
the road meets the Savannah Highway
and the tracks at Adams Run.
The Last Gypsy of the Brennica
Here, young stranger, a speckled egg
of Carpathian granite, blooming with crystal,
stolen in my youth from the womb
of a Moldavian stream, said the old Gypsy
when he handed the riverstone to me.
Mill it—down to flour.
Fertilize it with this old man’s ash,
carry the meal up to Ram Mountain
and cast it out there. Like the Roma,
let the rain wash it to the Odra and the Wisła,
let that blend of stone and man
leaven the two waters
with the ashes of my love
and the soul of my mountains.
Let it ride the Wisła east, the Odra west,
Down through Silesia, past Krakow’s poet-tomb;
May it seal the wounds of my people,
Prussian and Pole, Czech and Jew—
children of the two veins together;
our dark blood never spill again
even to where the twin rivers spill
upon the northern sea.
© 2015 Kaweah
Jeffers in Big Sur
Some time back, Jean Widaman of the Tor House Foundation was organizing an outdoor event at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, and she invited me—of all people—to contribute, so I committed several topical poems to memory for the May 17 event. I’d already had “Boats in a Fog,” “Night,” and others in my repertoire, but this was my first Big Sur event. Though things ran behind and I ran a bit slow and so wasn’t able to complete my segment, it went very well. I really got into the poems, and I felt as though I was nearly making love to the microphone (orally, of course). Jean had me repeat “Boats in a Fog,” I suppose as a sort of encore? I received a lot of good feedback. I even made a connection with a composer that might somehow score me a gig with the Monterey Symphony (as a narrator?)—welcome flattery for a quivering introvert like yours truly.