1.
I won’t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sun in that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.
Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.
2.
Fish—
ing, as Melville said,
“to purge the spleen,”
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.
3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.
The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.
Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line ’s tension
are a recognition.
4.
But it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creature,
we stared down centuries.
Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms
near shaggy eucalyptus groves
which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.
Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken of the woods,
we cooked in wine or butter,
beaten eggs or sour cream,
half-expecting to be
killed by a mistake. “Intense perspiration,”
you said late at night,
quoting the terrifying field guide
while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,
“is the first symptom of attack.”
Friends called our aromatic fungi
liebestoads and only ate the ones
that we most certainly survived.
Death shook us more than once
those days and floating back
it felt like life. Earth-wet, slithery,
we drifted toward the names of things.
Spore prints littered our table
like nervous stars. Rotting caps
gave off a musky smell of loam.
Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay
Apricots—
the downy buttock shape
hard black sculpture of the limbs
on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.
These were the staples of the China trade:
sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer
The pointillist look of laurels
their dappled pale green body stirs
down valley in the morning wind
Daphne was supple
my wife is tan, blue-rippled
pale in the dark hollows
Kit Carson in California:
it was the eyes of fish
that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes
he watched the ships come in
at Yerba Buena once, found obscene
the intelligence of crabs
their sidelong crawl, gulls
screeching for white meat,
flounders in tubs, startled
Musky fall—
slime of a saffron milkcap
the mottled amanita
delicate phallic toxic
How odd
the fruity warmth of zinfandel
geometries of “rational viticulture”
Plucked from algae sea spray
cold sun and a low rank tide
sea cucumbers
lolling in the crevices of rock
they traded men enough
to carve old Crocker’s railway out of rock
to eat these slugs
bêche-de-mer
The night they bombed Hanoi
we had been drinking red pinot
that was winter the walnut tree was bare
and the desert ironwood where waxwings
perched in spring drunk on pyracantha
squalls headwinds days gone
north on the infelicitous Pacific
The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs
seas grown bitter
with the salt of continents
Jerusalem artichokes
raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio
near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran
Coast range runoff turned salt creek
in the heat and indolence of August
That purple in the hills
owl’s clover stiffening the lupine
while the white flowers of the pollinated plant
seep red
the eye owns what is familiar
felt along the flesh
“an amethystine tinge”
Chants, recitations:
Olema
Tamalpais Mariposa
Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael
Emigrant Gap
Donner Pass
of all the laws
that bind us to the past
the names of things are
stubbornest
Late summer—
red berries darken the hawthorns
curls of yellow in the laurels
your body and the undulant
sharp edges of the hills
Clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs
Ishi
in San Francisco, 1911:
it was not the sea he wondered at
that inland man who saw the salmon
die to spawn and fed his dwindling people
from their rage to breed
it was the thousands of white bodies
on the beach
“Hansi saltu…” so many
ghosts
The long ripple in the swamp grass
is a skunk
he shuns the day
ADHESIVE: FOR EARLENE
How often we overslept
those gray enormous mornings
in the first year of marriage
and found that rain and wind
had scattered palm nuts,
palm leaves, and sweet rotting crab apples
across our wildered lawn.
By spring your belly was immense
and your coloring a high rosy almond.
We were so broke
we debated buying thumbtacks
at the Elmwood Dime Store
knowing cellophane tape would do.
Berkeley seemed more innocent
in those flush days
when we skipped lunch
to have the price of Les Enfants du Paradis.
A statuary Christ bleeds sweating grief
in the Gethsemane garden of St. Boniface Church
where empurpled Irish winos lurch
to their salvation. When incense and belief
will not suffice: ruby port in the storm
of muscatel-made images of hell
the city spews at their shuffling feet.
In the Longshoreman’s Hall across the street,
three decades have unloaded since the fight
to oust the manic Trotskyite
screwballs from the brotherhood. All goes well
since the unions closed their ranks,
boosted their pensions, and hired the banks
to manage funds for the workingman’s cartel.
Christ in plaster, the unions minting coin,
old hopes converge upon the Tenderloin
where Comte, Considérant, Fourier
are thick with dust in the two-bit tray
of cavernous secondhand bookstores
and the streets suffuse the ten-cent howl
of jukebox violence, just this side of blues.
Negro boy-whores in black tennis shoes
prowl in front of noisy hustler bars.
Like Samuel Gompers, they want more
on this street where every other whore
is painfully skinny, wears a bouffant,
and looks like a brown slow-blooming annual flower.
In the places that I haunt, no power
to transform the universal squalor
nor wisdom to withstand the thin wrists
of the girls who sell their bodies for a dollar
or two, the price of a Collected Maeterlinck.
The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,
this riding out the dying of the West.
We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores. You
asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”
A bearded birdlike man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Ugo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. Dusk was
a huge weird phosphorescent beast
dying slowly out across the bay.
our house waited and our books,
the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.
After dinner I read one anyway.
You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”
and when I said, “The limits of my language
are the limits of my world,” you laughed.
We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.
Afternoon cooking in the fall sun—
who is more naked
than the man
yelling, “Hey, I’m home!”
to an empty house?
thinking because the bay is clear,
the hills in yellow heat,
& scrub oak red in gullies
that great crowds of family
should tumble from the rooms
to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,
I-am-loved.
Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,
dust motes.
on the oak table
filets of sole
stewing in the juice of tangerines,
slices of green pepper
on a bone-white dish.
PALO ALTO: THE MARSHES
For Mariana Richardson (1830–1891)
1.
She dreamed along the beaches of this coast.
Here where the tide rides in to desolate
the sluggish margins of the bay,
sea grass sheens copper into distances.
Walking, I recite the hard
explosive names of birds:
egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.
Dull in the wind and early morning light,
the striped shadows of the cattails
twitch like nerves.
2.
Mud, roots, old cartridges, and blood.
High overhead, the long silence of the geese.
3.
“We take no prisoners,” John Frémont said
and took California for President Polk.
That was the Bear Flag War.
She watched it from the Mission San Rafael,
named for the archangel (the terrible one)
who gently laid a fish across the eyes
of saintly, miserable Tobias
that he might see.
The eyes of fish. The land
shimmers fearfully.
No archangels here, no ghosts,
and terns rise like seafoam
from the breaking surf.
4.
Kit Carson’s antique .45, blue,
new as grease. The roar
flings up echoes,
row on row of shrieking avocets.
The blood of Francisco de Haro,
Ramón de Haro, José de los Reyes Berryessa
runs darkly to the old ooze.
5.
The star thistles: erect, surprised,
6.
and blooming
violet caterpillar hairs. one
of the de Haros was her lover,
the books don’t say which.
They were twins.
7.
In California in the early spring
there are pale yellow mornings
when the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
like autumn, clarifies
like pain.
8.
Well I have dreamed this coast myself.
Dreamed Mariana, since her father owned the land
where I grew up. I saw her picture once:
a wraith encased in a high-necked black silk
dress so taut about the bones there were hardly ripples
for the light to play in. I knew her eyes
had watched the hills seep blue with lupine after rain,
seen the young peppers, heavy and intent,
first rosy drupes and then the acrid fruit,
the ache of spring. Black as her hair
the unreflecting venom of those eyes
is an aftermath I know, like these brackish,
russet pools a strange life feeds in
or the old fury of land grants, maps,
and deeds of trust. A furious dun-
colored mallard knows my kind
and skims across the edges of the marsh
where the dead bass surface
and their flaccid bellies bob.
9.
A chill tightens the skin
around my bones. The other California
and its bitter absent ghosts
dance to a stillness in the air:
the Klamath tribe was routed and they disappeared.
Even the dust seemed stunned,
tools on the ground, fishnets.
Fires crackled, smouldering.
No movement but the slow turning
of the smoke, no sounds but jays
shrill in the distance and flying further off.
The flicker of lizards, dragonflies.
And beyond the dry flag-woven lodges
a faint persistent slapping.
Carson found ten wagonloads
of fresh-caught salmon, silver
in the sun. The flat eyes stared.
Gills sucking the thin annulling air.
They flopped and shivered,
ten wagonloads. Kit Carson
burned the village to the ground.
They rode some twenty miles that day
and still they saw the black smoke
smear the sky above the pines.
10.
Here everything seems clear,
firmly etched against the pale
smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl’s clover,
rotting wharves. A tanker lugs silver
bomb-shaped napalm tins toward
port at Redwood City. Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description.
Again, almost with yearning,
I see the malice of her ancient eyes.
The mud flats hiss as the tide turns.
They say she died in Redwood City,
cursing “the goddammed Anglo-Yankee yoke.”
11.
The otters are gone from the bay
and I have seen five horses
easy in the grassy marsh
beside three snowy egrets.
Bird cries and the unembittered sun,
wings and the white bodies of the birds,
it is morning. Citizens are rising
to murder in their moral dreams.
CONCERNING THE AFTERLIFE, THE INDIANS OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA HAD ONLY THE DIMMEST NOTIONS
It is morning because the sun has risen.
I wake slowly in the early heat,
pick berries from the thorny vines.
They are deep red,
sugar-heavy, fuzzed with dust.
The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow
on the house, which gradually withdraws.
After breakfast
you will swim and I am going to read
that hard man Thomas Hobbes
on the causes of the English civil wars.
There are no women in his world,
Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers
over goods.
I see you in the later afternoon
your hair dry-yellow, plaited
from the waves, a faint salt sheen
across your belly and along your arms.
The kids bring from the sea
intricate calcium gifts—
black turbans, angular green whelks,
the whorled opalescent unicorn.
We may or may not
feel some irritation at the dinner hour.
The first stars, and after dark
Vega hangs in the lyre,
the Dipper tilts above the hill.
Traveling
in Europe Hobbes was haunted by motion.
Sailing or riding, he was suddenly aware
that all things move.
We will lie down,
finally, in our heaviness
and touch and drift toward morning.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AS A SONG
“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”
John Gray’s translation of Verlaine
& Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861
shorted him four centimes
on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”
It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.
The poet is a monarch of the clouds
& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy
and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs.
Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved
Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk
and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only
belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain
and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight
or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.
That professor of French,
trying to start his car
among the innocent snowdrifts,
is the author of a famous book
on the self.
The self is probably an illusion
and language the structure of illusions.
The self is beguiled, anyway,
by this engine of thought.
The self shuffles cards
with absurd dexterity.
The deck includes
an infinite number
of one-eyed jacks.
on warm days
he knows he should marry Being,
a nice girl, steady
but relentless.
The self has agreed to lecture
before a psychoanalytic study group.
on the appointed day he
does not appear, thereby
meeting his obligation.
The self grants an audience
to the Pope.
They talk shop.
The snark is writing a novel
called The Hunting of the Self.
The self is composing a monograph
on the frames of antique mirrors.
The self botanizes.
He dreams of breeding, one day,
an odorless narcissus.
There is a girl the self loves.
She has been trying to study him for days
but her mind keeps
wandering.
Quick in the April hedge
were juncos and kinglets.
I was at the window
just now, the bacon
sizzled under hand,
the coffee steamed
fragrantly & fountains
of the Water Music
issued from another room.
Living in a house
we live in the body
of our lives, last night
the odd after-dinner light
of early spring & now
the sunlight warming or
shadowing the morning rooms.
I am conscious of being
myself the inhabitant
of certain premises:
coffee & bacon & Handel
& upstairs asleep my wife.
very suddenly
old dusks break over me,
the thick shagged heads
of fig trees near the fence
& not wanting to go in
& swallows looping
on the darkened hill
& all that terror
in the house
& barely, only barely,
a softball
falling toward me
like a moon.
1.
What I wanted
in the pearly repetitions of February
was vision. All winter,
grieved and dull,
I hungered for it.
Sundays I looked for lightningstricken
trees
in the slow burning of the afternoon
to cut them down, split
the dry centers,
and kindle from their death
an evening’s warmth
in the uxorious amber repetitions
of the house. Dusks
weighted me, the fire,
the dim trees. I saw
the bare structure
of their hunger for light
reach to where darkness
joined them. The dark
and the limbs tangled
luxuriant as hair.
I could feel night gather them
but removed my eyes from the tug of it
and watched the fire,
a smaller thing,
contained by the hewn stone
of the dark hearth.
2.
I can’t decide
about my garbage and the creatures
who come at night to root
and scatter it. I could lock it
in the shed, but I imagine
wet noses, bodies grown alert
to the smells of warm decay
in the cold air. It seems a small thing
to share what I don’t want,
but winter mornings the white yard
blossoms grapefruit peels,
tin cans, plastic bags,
the russet cores of apples.
The refuse of my life
surrounds me and the sense of waste
in the dreary gathering of it
compels me all the more
to labor for the creatures
who quiver and are quick-eyed
and bang the cans at night
and are not grateful. The other morning,
walking early in the new sun,
I was rewarded. A thaw turned up
the lobster shells from Christmas Eve.
They rotted in the yard
and standing in the muddy field I caught,
as if across great distances,
a faint rank fragrance of the sea.
3.
There are times
I wish my ignorance were
more complete. I remember
clamming inland beaches
on the January tides
along Tomales Bay. A raw world
where green crabs
which have been exposed
graze nervously on intertidal kelp
and sea anemones are clenched and colorless
in eddying pools
near dumb clinging starfish
on the sides and undersides of rock.
Among the cockles and the horseneck clams,
I turned up long, inch-thick
sea worms. Female,
phallic, ruddy brown, each one
takes twenty years to grow.
Beach people call them innkeepers
because the tiny male lives inside
and feeds on plankton
in the water that the worm
churns through herself to move.
I watched the brown things
that brightness bruised
writhing in the sun. Then,
carefully, I buried them.
And, eyes drifting, heartsick,
honed to the wind’s edge,
my mind became the male
drowsing in that inland sea
who lives in darkness,
drops seed twice in twenty years,
and dies. I look from my window
to the white fields
and think about the taste of clams.
4.
A friend, the other night,
read poems full of rage
against the poor uses of desire
in mere enactment. A cruel music
lingered in my mind.
The poems made me think
I understood
why men cut women up. Hating
the source, nerved
irreducible, that music hacked
the body till the source was gone.
Then the heavy cock wields,
rises, spits seed
at random and the man
shrieks, homeless
and perfected in the empty dark.
His god is a thrust of infinite desire
beyond the tame musk
of companionable holes.
It descends to women occasionally
with contempt and languid tenderness.
I tried to hate my wife ’s cunt,
the sweet place where I rooted,
to imagine the satisfied disgust
of cutting her apart,
bloody and exultant
in the bad lighting and scratchy track
of butcher shops
in short experimental films.
It was easier that I might have supposed.
o spider cunt, o raw devourer.
I wondered what to make
of myself. There had been a thaw.
I looked for green shoots
in the garden, wild flowers in the woods.
I found none.
5.
In March the owls
began to mate. Moon
on windy snow. Mournful,
liquid, the dark hummed
their cries, a soft
confusion. Hard frost
feathered the windows.
I could not sleep.
I imagined the panic
of the meadow mouse,
the star-nosed mole.
Slowly at first, I
made a solemn face
and tried the almost human wail
of owls, ecstatic
in the winter trees, twoo, twoo.
I drew long breaths.
My wife stirred in our bed.
Joy seized me.
6.
Days return
day to me, the brittle light.
My alertness has no
issue. Deep in the woods
starburst needles of the white pine
are roof to the vacancies
in standing still. Wind
from the lake stings me.
Hemlocks grow cerebral
and firm in the dim attenuation
of the afternoon. The longer
dusks are a silence
born in pale redundancies
of silence. Walking home
I follow the pawprints of the fox.
I know that I know myself
no more than a seed
curled in the dark of a winged pod
knows flourishing.