Poems from Even So: New and Selected Poems, forthcoming from White Pine Press.
I once found a smooth, round stone, and I carried it in my pocket. If I’d believed in luck, I would have carried it for luck, but all I wanted then was ballast, something dense and durable—the weight of the world. This morning, after a hard rain, a bird is singing in the ferns below the house. Little wren, my stone, I would sail you across the sky.
The skunks and the deer are in rut again. They bolt from the roadside and stagger into traffic, blind with lust. A skunk was hit on the highway north of town. There was a long streak of gore, a greasy smear on the asphalt. Whoever passed it looked away, but they couldn’t escape the stench. It’s autumn. The monarchs have returned to the eucalyptus grove, persimmons ripen on their slender stems, and the walnut drops its leaves. In the desert, where the war goes on another year, yellow dates hang in heavy clusters from the palm trees.
Shards of pottery blanket the gopher mounds in the orchard: white stoneware, Blue Willow china, broken bits of carnival glass. I’ve found cup handles, crockery, bear’s teeth and oyster shells, an obsidian scraper and the bones from a man’s hand. The gophers burrow through the earth as if it was a churning sea, and the dead and the things they cherished do not rest easy.
Driving north along the coast, I glance up Swanton Road where it drops to meet the highway. A truck piled high with cordwood is parked on the shoulder, and on top of the wood, a young woman with long blonde hair sits naked, her weight resting on her arms, her head thrown back, her breasts thrust forward. I fix her in my gaze until my car speeds by and she’s gone. That was twenty years ago. This morning I passed that same spot, and looked for her the way I always do, and as always, I thought I saw her for just a moment, and I drove on.
Last night I dreamed about a bobcat, and this morning I found one sleeping beneath the persimmon tree. I was almost close enough to touch him, when he woke, fixed me with his eyes and disappeared into a thicket. The air was damp with last night’s rain. The matted leaves cushioned my steps, and persimmons blazed in the branches of the tree like a hundred suns. I don’t know if the cat appeared because I dreamed of him, or if I dreamed of him because he was so near.
A raven calls out overhead. He knows what a raven knows, and he sings what every raven sings. He is the forest’s darkest thought, and when he flies, he punishes the air with his wings. Once he’s passed, I hum a song to myself, one I’ve never heard before, one I make up as I go. A raven doesn’t live forever, but the raven doesn’t know.
Fissures in the bedrock open and shift, and each day the house tilts a little more toward the stream. At night, I can hear the granite shelf creak under its own weight, and when I hold my breath, I hear the water percolate beneath us. In the morning I see it running from the spring box, and I gather it in, and drink it.
The earth submits to seasonal drift. The stars slide, and the planets swing higher over the horizon every day. This morning the sun sent a shaft of light through a rift in the redwoods; it followed the steep angle of the canyon, skirted the stream, the wild azalea, the granite cutbank, and shone on the brick stoop beneath the stone arch at our gate. It rested there only for a moment, but my son found it. He sat there warming himself, and anyone watching the light play over his body could have believed he was made of gold.
Sparrows glean the air for gnats, and over the bluff two hawks hold, motionless above the breakers. Wind in the redwoods, a rush in the blood; I can feel the breeze that buoys the birds about to carry me away.
Near midnight, walking uphill by starlight, the ground still wet, the air brisk and moist after the storm, I was startled by a pocket of warm air. A breath from the mountain, the river, the trees? I turned to look. No, the moon.
Gary Young is Santa Cruz County’s first Poet Laureate. His books include Hands, The Dream of A Moral Life, Days, Braver Deeds, Pleasure and No Other Life, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. A new book, Even So: New and Selected Poems, will be published later this year. Gary teaches creative writing, and directs the Cowell Press at UCSC.
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