—Jeffers Country
As the trees conspired toward evening I walked below the tor its long grass edged & interrupted by rock
& low bracken in an air sifted by the sea’s scent powdered by kelp & foam Jeffers said
Of Weston as he might have said exactly of himself it takes great strength to believe truly
In solitude trusting its sinews & silence holding yourself against waves of your own darkness
*
I was taking Evangeline to rehab in Pacific Grove twenty years ago a place near Point Pinos Lighthouse
Lance had just moved to a new manse in Carmel at Scenic & Stewart & he’d said to come by because
He was right by Tor House & he was pretty sure I could find my way
& when I arrived I saw Jimi the Lion there & Cissie too & I yelled into the kitchen where Lance was swirling
Pasta in a pan & finally as I made my way to greet him I saw just past the kitchen patio not
Thirty feet beyond his window those huge looming eggs of stone the granite boulders Jeffers
Hauled & rolled from the shore beyond the tor every afternoon its medieval & majestic power
One whole side of Hawk Tower stolidly ascending in front of me & sometimes
The land can seem as harsh or even harsher than a skeptical man who walks mornings not speaking
The world’s raw sea edge awaiting him—he who slowly made stone love stone
*
There’s a photo of my namesake son at eight beside me as we follow the trail to Pinnacle Rock
& Cypress Grove on his first visit to Point Lobos exactly the age I was when first there with my aunt
& I remember feeling like the father I wasn’t until that day my son & I stood together above those lethal rocks
Smashed by purposeful waves & those skyrocket cathedrals of spray
*
Above Castro Creek a redwood circle illumined—its lichen lit by sunlight
An early silence & the day is released along the whole length of Castro Canyon Anna’s waking
Beneath the skylight of our cabin as outside the birds unchain again the many swaying promises of limbs
Within those nearby pines & naturally in this room beyond
*
Last night feeling as random as the rain . . . I read in Daybooks Weston praising Jeffers & that fierce pulse
Weston called the resurgent will of the natural world & I thought of Anna yesterday
Approached by a doe & curious fawns walking the circumference of Whalers Cove
& last week returning along the high cliffside trail from China Cove we’d stopped so I could shoot all
Point Lobos fanned out & ragged—its exquisite prospects rising up & just below us a discrete pebble beach
& familiar tide pools where Ansel Adams told anyone who’d listen must one day be named Weston Beach
& so it was & so it is
*
The summer I turned sixteen visiting my aunt in the skylit studio she’d built onto the cottage
In my grandmother’s landscaped garden among rose beds & curved lawns & tall candles of iris—& as
We talked across the rising perfume of turpentine & fresh oils my aunt turned from the canvas
She’d been painting of the Santa Lucia Range & paused a moment handing me
A birthday gift a fresh hardcover of Not Man Apart with Jeffers’s poems & images of Big Sur’s coast
& she opened the book to a photograph by Weston of the familiar cove its surly rocks & twisted kelp & pebbles
& asked Do you remember the day I took you here? That man who called out hello with the tripod & box camera was
Weston’s son—my gorgeous old Graflex I always use & love was his once
*
A few years after Lance moved from his place down along Yankee Point up to the Highlands
We rendezvoused in Carmel & I followed him past the turnoff leading to Weston’s house on Wildcat Hill
Until we looped up Mal Paso onto San Remo & then we all just sat watching
That scarlet sunset fan dance over the Pacific’s darkening jade
*
For years I’d kept a notebook of obscure trails between Point Lobos & Gorda all those glories
Of both Big & Little Sur but that morning we decided let’s be obvious & drove down toward McWay Falls
Stopping on the roadside to spend time along Partington Cove Trail
—I broke stride a moment as above the meadow in the dense pines a shadow cross
Hung overhead barely clearing the pines’ tips a silent condor just arcing away
The span of its wings ten feet one fan-feathered tip to the other
*
I grew up in a house of redwood glass & stone the house my mother built from Cliff May’s blueprints
A lesson in organic mid-century modern aspiration huge exposed beams of solid redwood its ceiling planks too
The fireplace a mosaic of flagstones & multicolored volcanic rocks & living room walls pale Australian gum
A house that could comfortably have fit in Mill Valley or Carmel yet somehow also in the arid San Joaquin
The Fresno of my childhood where it stood as testament to possibility—my California of the ’50s
*
Today we walked down to Henry Miller’s library to steal Wi-Fi & sit with an espresso
—as news of the world came a hawk overhead dipped one wing
So I turned off my phone & opened The Air-Conditioned Nightmare & that’s all the irony anyone should share
*
In 1936 a hundred miles south of these rock crags sloping low & falling abruptly off into the Pacific
Charis drove Weston to Oceano & its miles of dunes so he could plant his 8 x 10 Century Universal camera on its skinny tripod
Into the sands & one day Charis sunbathing nude decided simply to roll down the face of one dune & another
& so posing for Edward the Spy those hours & days while they stayed in Gavin Arthur’s (see The Circle of Sex)
Old beach shack & this morning I awoke thinking of Charis driving back up Highway 1 along the coast
Past Morro Rock & Moonstone Beach past Piedras Blancas & Lucia & up over Bixby Creek then to the Highlands
All the way to Wildcat Hill & the swarm of felines tame & feral & then Edward making coffee
As she began slicing the apples she’d left on the wood counter to ripen & now emanations
Of naked Edenic fruits were scenting the whole length of the room
Its bare redwood planks & ripening apple flesh held in late dusk & the wood stove
Heated up as Charis knelt to feed more limbs to its belly & she knew these next days in the darkroom
They would bring to paper this sequence of nudes her body white on white against Oceano’s dunes
Her final acquiescence & reverence for skin married to a future light
*
One day last fall I went to Tor House early to be alone a few hours before the tours began
& climb the stairs of Hawk Tower in solitude & later stand in silence by the bed by the sea-window
Jeffers chose as a good death-bed thirty years before the fact to see
The pulse of waves licking raw the shore stones as pines & cypress chimed in the sea wind
*
It hardly matters to anyone but me how sometimes as I walk this coast Point Pinos Point Lobos Point Sur I’m singing
South Coast the wild coast is lonely . . . the lion still rules the barranca & a man there is always alone