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Collected Poetry

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poetry and digital art

In California

  In December 


Through the sharply-lit brilliance of windsong
      December
I drove my little car.  Burning joy
and refined petroleum in an effortless,
computerized combustion,
I traveled the inclines and downgrades
of this most recent version of the emigrant
      trail.
In primordial source could I, did I
brave the brake lights and lane changers
of the stupendous, on this miraculous, modern
      road.
Unencumbered, emancipated by convenience,
I drove the seven miles into town
aggravated only by the morning light
which seemed too extravagant for this season,
which seemed keenly diligent for December
as it bounded through the windshield sparkling
in a vintage that overpowered the pupils in my
      eyes
and ultimately devoured my senses.  My senses
were corrupted; yet I had to look.  I had to see
this remarkable display of aboriginal presence
and be captive to its power and irreproachable
      dominion.

I found myself thinking.  I saw myself, asking:
how could I live here—here in the great extremes
of the ordinary world?  How could I not
have been aware of this cryptic elegance
before now.  The trees did not need their leaves.
The conifers were not trees.  The brown lake
was only a reservoir.  The sky was an obtuse,
      vertebrate
conception.  And why did I trust in the acute
but inert sensitivities of these other drivers?
Did they not see this mnemonic, yet ordinary,
      obstacle
that endured this drama of time and space
between them and their articulated destination.
Yet in a very similar way my foot could depress
the gas pedal; my eyes could scan the landscape
while my arms compensated with minor adjustments
      to the steering wheel,
as it now seemed a ponderable and quietly
comforting question that I began to consider.
The big trucks were decipherable and neat as snow
occasionally fell from their wheel wells.  Birds
did not cause me alarm.  And I could recognize
the golf course and the abandoned orchard
as the golf course and the abandoned orchard.

Why did I not trust the acuity of these other
      travelers,
these pseudo replicas of myself?  Why would this
sudden paranoia
seem justified in this light?  From what environment
did I carry this sense of doubt?  Here was a landscape
I could not rid myself of, that I could not penetrate,
or cease to indulge with my participation.
Here was a tapestry that existed in all forms
of time, made of a fabric so intricate and
majestically correct that even the defects
were a sign of perfection.  And here it was,
immodest, generally open to inspection, at ease
with itself.  It just sat there, spinning.

Two ponies, one roan and one painted, stood
in the only piece of a half-acre pasture
that wasn't iced with snow.  There was some browse
still struggling up, but the ponies were still
warming off the frost.  The sun had yet to top
the ponderosa that darkened the pasture
and the oddly new structure behind it.  There was a
      white
satellite dish and a rock wall from some other time.
There was a beauty and a quiet history and a sense
of hardship exacerbated by the lovely snow
and the ponies' frosty exhalations.  I envied
the two ponies, their aloof compensation,
knowing the browse would continue to grow—
knowing that my itinerary would continue to roll
down some road, fording creeks and crossing
great expanses of ice and snow, heading somewhere
specific, going to join some untamed, exhaling thing.




 
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