I
Walking across the PCH, we looked
Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen,
Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.
I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled
At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights
As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite-
Anapestic song of sea and air—
The raw and sudden crick of crickets—
The cars, suddenly silent as cows—
And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.
II
A poem is a view of the Pacific
And the Pacific, and the Pacific
Taking in its view of the Pacific,
And the Pacific as the Pacific
(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific)
Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,
Closing. It or she or he is merely,
Which means it or she or he is a mar.
But a mar made up of temperament and
Tempo—the red weather in the heart.
III
I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:
Santa Monica behind me, the ocean
To my left, Jupiter high above me,
And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked
With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays
In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills
Like the tricolor of a country made
Of beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.
Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing;
Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.
IV
Along the thin pedestrian passage
Beside the PCH, just off Sunset,
Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends
And lies and facts—Jews and blacks being
Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy
Like bruschetta. He storms at the police
Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt
Like a toga. He schools them his toga
Wisdom from toga times. He offers them
His toga. They offer him a ride—.
V
Arun’s car carried us like metaphor
In a poem or painting; moving meaning;
Moving the current; being the current;
The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;
Still, even as we speed on the 110,
The music in my head, the Jupiter
Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean
As it unfurls in the vapor trail of
Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,
Like a nocturnal flower calling you.
VI
Then Downtown LA and LA Live surged
Up, like marginalia on a newly
Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions,
Fiery accusations of its own
Brilliance that descend into indifference.
We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and
It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.
Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.
But I should know better, if just because
You can smell the injustice in the air.
VII
The Pacific encircles me. Slowly.
As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better
Said, I only understand it this way:
By feeling like a stranger at its blue
Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his
Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay
As though some Cathay exists and be glad.
No, the differences we have should be felt
And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack;
A power to take in what you can’t take back.
VIII
The old hocus of this ocean’s focus
On pulling its waves over the soft surf
Like a skin pulled down tight over the top
Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus.
We stared out with her, out towards Hokusai’s
Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells
No chunk of haiku could think to charter.
It was like the eighth day of creation
In the eighth line of a poem—she sang,
She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.