It is December and I am homeless in two cities a thousand miles apart
And on this date when I first opened my eyes to see what I was crying about
When I first began to stir all these sensations into a great muddle
When the round bodies of automobiles held the keys to every horizon
When only my mother's lullabies mattered
As my parents' faces slowly emerged out of the blur that is our glorious
beginning
And I grew to peek around corners
Not knowing one day I would chase my past down roads it never took
And 46 years later find my way to Memphis
Standing by the river whose broad current cuts through the continent
Who has carried cities of silt down to the Gulf
Who has clothed America in cotton
In whom raw dreams have kept afloat only to be banked at unlikely turns
And every day the highway leaps across the Mississippi
And every day I trample sacred ground
Where someone first tasted the sacrament of another's lips
Where someone stood waist deep in the moment
But I am a restless pedestrian pacing the upper deck of a riverboat peering at the
history of America
And I am nothing if not a gentrified vagabond, a collage of mixed metaphors, a
repository of insatiable desires, a body with only so many breaths left
And so I have rummaged through the remains of paradise
Beholding myth in the sweat of mortals
Seeing art when the sky was just doing its job
And the brown waters eddy beneath the bridges I cross and recross
And there is no rest though the sun slips off into Arkansas
Though the delta sleeps a few depleted hours
While the country grows fat off the memory of heroes it's martyred
And in this world of wet clay, rich humus, gambling barges, trailer homes built on
stilts by riverbanks south of Memphis
Under the humid stars, under the spell of flooded banks, wooden rafts, the
hushed wind, the migrations of millions
The river inexhaustibly outruns itself.
At dawn on Point Lobos,
I stand with a friend,
she, middle-aged and pregnant,
and I, a romantic
watch adolescent seals in the cove beneath us
jockey for position, on the drier parts of rock.
This entire day,
deep contours and swells
forge ahead,
furl away—an arc
of motion and time;
the sun climbs the horizon,
the sea clears her own passage,
carries herself splendidly
round the lavished seals
while overhead, pelicans fly
hard and low slung across
the rip—tip one wing,
hurl into the green wash, into the food chain,
and swallow.
But for their appetite they'd outfly oceans.
But for their appetite, they'd be extinct.
From our viewpoint high above the sea
we want to praise the congregation,
give the whole of creation
a song to embrace,
an ecology of belonging,
added joy for the struggle.
So we cheer, wave tie-dyed hats,
play the penny whistle, sing My Favorite Things
a melody that, for us, has survived childhood.
And although the seals do not
look up smiling nor the birds coast down singing—
O, we sustain.
Robinson Jeffers was right.
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
California, some say,
is a fabled land, Shangri-la.
Others say, a ruined place,
oblivion on the brink, where
whatever feels good
do.
Let them.
The lone cypress leans on air;
the pelicans, at sunset,
array themselves across the shale
and with frayed wings open,
hitched to the breeze,
preen one another before sleep.
2. The Picture
It shows you in front of a neon
B
A
R
sign on the street in New York
Your face impassive but patient
Cigs in the pocket of your open-neck shirt
Forearms bared by your rolled-up sleeves
Your left hand resting casually on your thigh
In your well-worn wrinkled khakis
You look lived-in
You wear the husbandly comfort
Of a man I've loved 30 years
But never got to tell "Good Night"
Never got to watch sleep
Amid the Sunday morning sheets
Never even got to meet
So please
Take your hands and arms
And neck and thighs
Back into the bar
Set your tush on the stool
Fish a cig from the pack
Hang it loosely between your lips
And moisten your fingertips
Picking tobacco from your tongue
Rankle at the whiff of lighter fluid
As the flame lights up your tilted face
And you snap the silver case shut
Drawing deeply into your lungs
And blowing back a cloud of smoke
Click your teeth against the rim of your glass
Swallow and follow
The burning-cold liquor
On its trip to your stomach
Where it will start to kill you
And dig the company of your
Vast collection of friends
While you can
Sorry I can't join you
