California Poems, 2024
California Poems, 2024
These 10 poems were all written in the state of California in 2024, a year in which I found myself in California more often than not. After rushing around 50 states for the last few years, I slowed down enough for the gravity of our greatest state to pull me in; it is my home out West more than anywhere else. I spent January-April in the deserts of Southern California, and June-September along the coast of Northern California; the high Sierras bridged the two, as I traversed from south to north and south again. The first half of this collection plays a lot with light and water; the second half plays more with the self, becoming, and possibilities. This is my first time selecting poems for a cohesive single collection.
Poems with capitalization were written in a notebook; poems in lowercase were written in my phone notes. ‘East Jesus’ was written in the neighborhood of East Jesus in Slab City, a peculiar anarchic art community in the desert; ‘Lucid’ somewhere in the desert near the Colorado River; ‘View Over Desert Washes and Valleys (From the Perspective of Water)’ and ‘alpenglow gorgonio’ in Twentynine Palms; ‘release’ while boondocking in the Stanislaus National Forest near Yosemite; ‘mirror lake’ in Yosemite Valley; ‘Marin’ and ‘California’ overlooking the ocean while hiking up Mount Tamalpais from the Pacific Coast Highway pulloff where I spent a large portion of the summer; ‘golden gate’ in San Francisco, somewhere between Crissy Field and the Golden Gate Bridge; ‘Ashore’ at one of my favorite places way up the Northern California coast, a black sand beach near the mouth of the Klamath River north of Redwood National Park.
(If you’re reading this on your phone, I recommend turning your phone sideways for certain wider poems, so you can see the true intended line breaks.)
~
mirror lake for ellen to see the world as it is is a polishing of one lens: not so much the effort of endless shavings, grindings at the edge of the self in friction with the sun but a settling into perfection, resting into the shape reality wants to see itself eye to eye: parallel, perpendicular, gapless light along the awareness of water
~
East Jesus
A wall of glass bottles aligned in cement
Lights like souls glow through all lenses
Of materials the patient spirit wants
Slowly to reluminate the mind of matter
In animate alchemy the forward burn
Of art ever reborn, recycled metal melting
All details toward the warm general
Incandescence
~
View Over Desert Washes and Valleys
(From the Perspective of Water)
I would like to learn to live
From the perspective of water—
To see the world as both
Flat and infinitely
Faceted:
Something to work one’s way
Into, a lover of deepening
To fill in all the cracks
And forward—
How wonderful it would be
To feel it all once
~
Lucid
Light loosely drizzles down the sides of souls
Open unlearning as a universal rememory
Honeysweet in the nowsense of the new moment
Warmth on the windows of my interior
Lingering along like heavenly candlewax
All these daisysoft and sunny ways of becoming
Alpenglowing light lengthening late leaving slow
I see alike now the aftershocks of waking
The wild sunset unparting edge of the spirit
~
alpenglow gorgonio
the sun rises from as far away as possible
finally after endless night the desert wakes
up with birds in bushes and on powerlines
singing the springtime with choruses of flowers
the final mountain edging the wasteland—
desiderata, snowcapped, the promise of
paradise in pink, end of the desert in sight,
morning alpenglow flinging my curved light
westward beyond eden, beyond angelwater,
where rough peace wanders an infinite sea
~
release
searing solitude like an ice cube
melting my overheated mind—
a moment when the world finally lets me
go, a release in which i do not move, falling
towards no immediate star but myself:
sitting silently upon this smooth white log
with my loyal dog lying quiet by my right,
as i, surviving fire, relax all reactions to
safely assume the shape of this particular
seam of the sierras, here i am emptying
to be filled with sounds of tuolumne flowing
and incidental birdsongs
~
Ashore
We wake upon the shore of the past
Suddenly, this selfsame moment is
Spat out by possibility, sputtering disbelief—
Now, light sparkles the very edges of the ocean,
Glimpses fast and passing
Of this glancing reality
So here we are, feet in the sand together
I imagine sitting on this piece of
Beached driftwood
Like a poem,
Wrecked and solitary, here speaking
Like a finger outstretched over the open sea, as
We tell ourselves stories of how we
Washed ashore
~
Marin
The wanderers had wandered many a wondering way
Following the sunset westward, eyes
Twinkling with the shine of things, across the continent
While they forgot the paths behind them
And remembered the path ahead, until
Finally they found a perfect place,
The end of their story,
Eden again
Having learned slowly from their mistakes, the clear cuts
And the fires, the hunger of concrete:
Some branches are better left uncut
Only half too late the truth blew in
Like the open ocean— they took a breath
Looking out over the most beautiful city
And worked together to tend the garden
To make art of life is to perfect relationship
Between changing and saving
The world and ourselves
~
California for Caroline We know the last line is California, dreamer with nowhere else to go, but there seems to be much more of it, and spreading from here above the changing coastline halfway up Mount Tamalpais where this pen running out of ink listens as San Francisco speaks with the ocean about all ways after now. My pockets are mostly full of the stuff of long journeys but one, where the notebook was, is empty. The whales have settled their celebration of the day; evening air iridesces pink and heavy. An adventure of a sunset has crossed this continent. Lucky, for the sun also rises— tomorrow as today, here, in California.
~
golden gate
at the end of america
is an opening: