On Sundays in mid-winter, when wild iris
put their iridescent blades through the grasses
and yellow lupine wait to flower from their seven-
fingered hands, all the divorced Californians
start out to the Point with their bottled waters
in their fragile foreign cars; they pass the turn-off
for the hopeful murmur of beaches, and pass
the moody grays of cooperative farms, the cattle
with their useful udders the color of wild geranium;
then they park if they can and descend the long steps
by the lighthouse where the tough crimson algae
cling to the broken stones, and when they arrive
at the rail they look past the cormorants, past
the Farallones to the space where the whales should be,
and the split chord of the foghorn calls to them.
The whales are too far to hear it; the whales,
in their secrecy, give off the dull sheen
of Etruscan mirrors. Down the coast they travel,
and the twisted cypresses gather to look: they swim
by L.A., with its nights of shining leather, toward
the temperate waters of Baja where they will mate.
In pictures, they are all smiles: sweet diligence,
or the weak little smile of exhausted history.
Their corrugated sides undulate as they play,
moving in a time both linear and cyclical.
They all swim here: Melville’s whale, and Jonah’s—
even the hollow plaster whale of Disney—
for this is California. Surely the people crave
some blankness between sightings, but someone
spots one every few minutes: a heart-breaking flash,
the cry goes out—each moment a contained unit—
then the cry passes, brief as a human life.
They say the call is heard in all the great systems.
The sleepy ones have gathered at the shore
to proclaim the glamour of the alien sun,
while in the nearby desert one real solitary
arranges himself on a pile of fronds . . . Come home,
says the disembodied voice to all of them.
But here on the Point the wind is fierce;
it blows the people to the right as they pose
for snapshots under the beehive-shaped, art deco
lantern, and the foghorn calls their two-toned names
until the names sound interchangeable: John-ny! Mar-y!
a major third downward, accent on the second syllable.
The call goes out in reverse, away from them,
over the hugely populated universe as though
it sent their questions out for them:
What shall we be? What shall we do now,
divorced from our lives, and from this century?
And the land splits behind them, the conglomerate cliffs
letting them go, letting the Point slide toward Alaska.
They wait as if at the prow of a fatherless ship,
leaning there; they have waited a long time,
they are so used to waiting, they have waited for
the winning number, or for the changes in someone,
or for the nocturne to rewind itself around the spool—
shouldn’t something have pity on them now?
It is late; pelicans and egrets and herons go by,
and the foghorn continues its anthem of names, only
for them, of course, only in this human realm.