Deckchairs
Shadows of two
weathered,
faded
in the sunlight,
facing the sea
now blue, now gray, now stormy, now chiffon silver, weathering a skin
of years, a life
pressed into them weaving an intricate sundial
of shadows
sometimes touching, sometimes entwined, sometimes separate, always dancing
with each other, two lives of weathered gray wood in
a sunpaced dance
of shadows on the deck
in time and
weathered skin
among the fresh pots of
Iceland poppies afire in the sun.
Seventieth
She curls in loose clothes on a soft couch
in this coast cottage, reading aloud in the afternoon light.
The sounds of the sea lull through the open window.
She tilts her head as her glasses reflect the ocean’s light.
Houses on sea cliffs pull us to them - a solitude, a stillness.
Abyss and promise roll in like waves or pages turned in a book.
The sea and stories are endless.
This morning we did the crosswords
over sunflower bread, peach jam, and our morning pills.
Sweater-bundled, sipping our coffee in the early chill,
the words seemed all new.
Later, I sit and listen to her read.
Her hands turn the pages. The sun circles into the sea.
Sentence follows sentence like tracks in the sand.
The pages keep turning from right to left,
more than we can read by fading afternoon light.
There are always more stories, more tracks on the beach,
more waves, too many to follow before the light disappears.
After so many pass, years lose ceremony, importance.
Our stories are the important things. We read to each other.
The water and sea stay. The waves pass through.
The Coast Starlight
The train glides along its clear rails.
Images change through the window.
We arc around the coast cliffs then fly north.
I waited, bundled in my child’s coat
in the old Pennsylvania train station
waiting with my mother in the early years.
The train speaks in soft voices,
a tremolo of wheel and rocking
as it rushes along like the arrow of time.
I played with Lionel trains in the old house
in the screened-in porch that summer
with my father that year before he died.
I walk through the linked coaches
haunted by bits of conversation.
The dining car tempts with food and wine.
Eating at the diner that summer break from college,
walking across empty tracks in the evening,
the rails seemed to stretch from me to their vanishing point.
Afterward, I return to my sleeper.
The sun sinks. In an ocean of stars, a nuance of moon
stretches out like a delicate bridge.
Zamora
Video of the author reading this poem
It shimmers
in summer light
just off I-5, a few
streets, the poetry
of cracked asphalt metered
with square houses,
bleached stucco deserted
in the mid-day furnace.
The stillness, almost complete,
punctuated by the rhythms of
a gas pump and a lone
ice-cream truck dispensing
cool dreams in the still dust.
A dog, overlaid with shadows,
twitches with visions of
the tall ears of rabbits
seen in the parched grass
in the surrounding fields.
With the splinters of recognition
that we collect throughout our lives
we move forward, what ever forward is.
The ice-cream truck leaves
and the few children disappear
back into the streets with
their treasured ships of chocolate
and ice cream sailing off
into their own cool, melting
personal heavens.
Through the Valley
Video of the author reading this poem
Along I-5, heading south,
wet winter going into an early spring,
almond and apricot trees loom
in newly pink and white blossomed orchards
in the tule fog. The valley floor undulates
under the engine hum, lilt of road motion,
and the occasional silhouette
of a hawk, a ghost in the fog,
perched alert on a passing fence post.
Valley tumbleweeds,
black from months of wetness, hunch twisted,
their coils caught against fences,
in the barbed wire,
their darkness a resonance
in the cool pearl light.
The tumbleweed,
weaving itself into itself,
perfecting its separate presence, its
rootlessness, suddenly caught
by its own ingrown nets.
This time of year the farmers
clear their fields of them, their fences.
They collect them in piles
then set them afire.
The wet, ingrown heaps burn stubborn
in the damp fields, nothing dry but
their memory of desert birth.
Another hawk looms on a passing fence post,
a chimera in the mist -
a living Horus, a god out of season,
ruffled by the wet winter-spring wind.
It senses the burning tumbleweed, the sweet
scent of burning thoughts - prey, prey, prey,
launched on soft wings from a fencepost
slightly above
a newly trapped tumbleweed.
