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from The California Poem
A California song,
A prophecy and indirection, a
thought impalpable to breathe as air
—WW
But this, but you— small, pitiful and twiggy—
—The Odyssey
According to my lights
as I circle & touch upon this state or that
uncouth gringos are lounging in the shade
harmonica-players in Grass Valley pull salmon out of chaotic rivers
real-life vampires who chew Bazooka only go out at night
and up in Humboldt someone's getting 10 bucks an hour to
trim weed
I'd like to fit you into this
rectangle which was
the courthouse at Tehachapi One can arrive
on a motorbike or walk there
by moonlight across oasis-
laden deserts, through irrigated groves. I walked
there in the
heat & in the night & by the moon I heard
the song my cat's ears made traveling
over tiny ridges in sand—Did you, Mr.
Stevens, sneaking through? When Odysseus
went to sleep, s/he did not
need a
book in the desert. She was
the book.
If a succoring arm would come buckle me
like a Tenement, a heavy object attached to this bodily
vessel
to stabilize reports running into nail-laden driftwood on
Goleta's beaches (how many
skanky masturbators have I seen?) or teach me to speak
Hindi out of the blue
The snoring wind wrapped
round the house tonight & banged the door
against my head you can't say "Music
comes from God," that's just silly my friends were
trying to explain me in the situation in the
future if it were to speak
it would speak of you:
When darkness was caming
what you write you can drop it
in the sea
***
Rise up, ———phonemes
cum genomes, let
language disintegrate, tiny
technology in the compost heap; gumdrops; I mean
our species; the ovicidal moonfish slips
into Sirius, Canis Major-bright my words, dive-
bombing swallows angry at my hair & slip
new gods
into the sky, the whites
of their eyes in the aerial
and orbital annals of the rotations of earth & moon,
with reference
to the background of stars, I reposition
all bodily organs, effulgent
fruit fractioned into pistil parts
simpering on the vine; make this god
a mountainlionface
with a woman's lips, that one a
monster boy spread out
across
the sky. And in the potato bugs' and earwigs'
myth of the rape
of tomatoes new things are birthed, new
constellations, new creatures, born;
in the frightened upper
atmosphere, appearing
in the hemisphere above us
in the most eucumenically
expensive country measured out in mean solar time
a flawed human body with golden, molten veins
***
—Sugar, there comes a time
when a woman needs most
water, rain,
cloud,
rock, flower, dirt
—Stranger, the sea
is a pie of ripe salt water aloft hiding treasures, surface tension
an inverse lens
magnifying
the Bathing
Place of my many-times-bright sardines
By adjunct grace do
kelp blossoms surge
in the race of the West
from Earth. All rise.
A thought wavy and loose
showed me
the endings of matter, things
beyond
hope, gold cuffs of
long distances drawn on the jaw; as the chemical eye
adjusts, dark adaptation; there are places the light of thought
does not penetrate; reverberations in space.
There are songs too long to sing, i.e.,
the power to measure pebbles, e.g., all the
ones in that sea, so pigeons
pinioning, pioneers, let's us
swish out with the light.
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