Melons and plums
and peaches, eating and drinking,
and the bugle, all the day long.
These are the glorious
occupations that engross a
proud and thinking being,
running [t]his race of
preparation for the eternal world.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

I want to tell you about the dream. The California is a paradise lake with colorful animals
dream. The when I go back to my homeland California is a paradise I am happy for you dream

"in which Alexander the Great invented" the caterpillar "personally"

We were going ever so through the dusty eucalyptus the dusty eucalyptus & shadow road in the "opposite of blindness" & "relinquished speech" & "focusing on my mother’s throat," like
taking a picture of it when it’s interesting thinking

The lake is to the left. On one side, a tall Pink bird invented by space and time called

Heron, & there, other small & medium birds shiny & loose
with pockets of Geryon-ash-gold. What can be lit I’ll light that I’ll light that for you dream

 

a kissing everything goodbye in the lyric pelt & an eye

 

of spit

a thoin gutterful of vowels
out of the battery & ground

in the teeth, death
in the bush, 2 in the hand

in the nape of the napalm of sun-shore-sun I am an orphan! I am still Ishmael! dream

 

… … Who was counting the ribs
in my grandfather’s ships? My Fist versus Coastal

margins of coconut novelties which recede
and advance upon the shelf like a carved animal army, Rosy
Razor clams with calendars on their backs, diatoms, wentletraps, the Owl
Limpet dueled viciously upon the sands, moving toward his enemy like a "bulldozer in extreme
slow motion," drifting

away from the dream of California

which is dust & light & dust

being tossed in the white

chenille

blanket besides the low white stucco barracks
with roosters between the houses scratching at the dust of light of the dream

fantastic
thorny shapes that stand in the desert as tall as a house sticking up out of the desert part of
California absurd tiny flowers frozen in the tips Needles
birthed a poet, and goats heads

This poem
is therein, in my dream of Death
Valley a low
depression & gloss of surface lands,
mountains, of lava, their parent sea, removed to form this one great golden glossy
cake and plain of irregular form, valleys, coast, gloss of gloss
Angeles and & Inyo County is just
dusty in the bus station at the cold night shifting
from foot to foot in 1973. Tumbleweeds
go by.

In my sleeping nostalgia for the Streets
of San Francisco dream like seeing Michael
Douglas in an elevator in
California (not
that satisfying), or
my dream of a saguaro flower weather bath or California born in the shape
of Karl Malden’s nose as it appears in One-eyed Jacks.

In California we don’t say bodega except
for the bay, we say
market, which is what
it is. We don’t say buttercup
we say butter box or butter cut. If you say margarine, we bodacious
we don’t say you be we say I is
In California, fire hydrant is a way to say freeway which in turn turns to freely allie All ye in
come free into dusk motes

at Lake of our Lady, etc., by the sea shore & my right hand very close to the Earthly Paradise
California named for a tribe

of Ladies with Big Feet, Rose Bowl
football & the black hole
of Livermore where the flames and the tripods expired. It is

all of New York, New England,
Pennsylvania & New Jersey combined.

Laugh for the eucalyptus as an object of pity
The truth of Georgia is not to be found here in sushi dinners

 

but there is the dirt bike parade
in the mud behind subdivision A-3, Santa Maria,
Camarillo, & so on, near the lemon groves both beautiful & useful

 

In the deadyard at Dolores crumbling into dust & light is California and California’s
variegated surface forgets that dust which came
to bequeath them space & light, nudibranchs did I
say Cachuma’s foot
prints in the ashy mud of the bones of our forefathers ground
up like pellets did I turn to the bones of mice bones in the coyote fox eagle shit

A spine brought to the whole length of California was laid out like a golden wheel-veil of
cascades of oldest & largest living things and everything was crushed
in a Catherine’s wheel

At 13, I acquired a good tan in California
to brush with the gods & god squeezers & boring
and smiling compliments so much less
to rake and scratch the character on

as I too was raked along the bottom
feeders & surface
waters like El Niño doing a brody
through our air/hair at the Sunday meeting I was myself a dumb
dog who could not bark

At the sadness of early California, the sado-maso’s down from the hills and Sadducees, their
desire, denial of everything dead, and the existence of angels;
California and Sadie Hawkins;

& its meadows associated with human folly, its airs of superiority, knowing
the it and what
it is.

 

And the echinoderms give up
their radial symmetry. The laughable echinoderms moving back
toward bilaterality like drunken teens

California in the lights of the trees
my hedon eden I rushed
to California with my eyes
closed. Bill our president was there, fire rushed
down his snout like a dining rage & through
the pinelands of Banana Road, like three light fingers making waste across the ice lakes of
Jupiter’s moons, Io.

 

From the center of rice I do remember California
stitched up twice
in my memory of sleeveless shirts &
Ocean A, D or Q
behind the not tall buildings

 

            I know nothing of Northern
North California therefore
there is none, Arcata, etc., yet I
would like to sell [you] [send] you California
& its industrial wastelands, & the Cryps

& the Bloods, the
ACTION! CAMERA! and fully armed cactus. Each studio is a nation-
state of its own under the cloudless blue
neon & the bright
stucco Draco
of sun
of tile
of bottlebrush
of lovely picture baby
bird-
of-paradise
honeysuckle
yucca
Joshua
Tree, home
of John Steinbeck, & Mrs. McGroaty

•••

 

 

 

It’s o.k. here but we don’t have any sourgrass
not so many happy lizards in the sun
seaweed sliding back toward licking the sea
sandflies, sandfleas
jogging men nasty naked along the beach, Joakim’s oily eucalyptus combusting up toward heaven

I was swimming in the black water under-
neath my breath & then
dragged by the seaweed vines and belts

the water is yellow with sand and ecology, my friends

are being punished by off-duty fathers in tract houses they are not allowed to leave
             after dark

Wily, we live in Ladera derelict apartments are government
subsidized, go
everywhere
at night
on shore

Oil rigs out in the water like lighted bird-palace places

In the dream of dying cephalopods

Cuttlefish feathers & things
invented by sound & light like
the Great Spangled Fritillary monarch, and magnitude
of scales, what lies in inner and outer margins of such
wings "that came with soft
alarm, like hurtless light," and the numberous thunder
of veins

Bluebellies in strange arrangement break their tails
in weedy nooses and grow back new ones
Backs bend in the rows between crop-dusted plants, the little singing seeds sting the
fingers & stain them: red, red

 

Eagle shells crumbling under the eagle’s weight croaking at Cachuma Lake

 

California did not hold its shape
when [ the condors ] were laid end-to-end
to form a replica of California
with photographs & balsa wood & glue
which was later
beamed to space
as a message off the coast (Big Sur). The message is
from the gardens of the sea: graphed in the intelligent
& learnèd scallop’s eyes (bright), amid its tentacular
fringe: writ

in the fossil guts of hermaphroditc oysters hanging
out in kitchen middens, a theatre

acted out on land-
masses and by motoring pairs of "self-
powered castanets," molluscs, in
zigzag arcs. This heroic

fantasy is set
in an ominous landscape, a dark world that mirrors out watery arms
& legs, but not our muscular
hearts.

 

Everything I know
occurred in California and everything
I know later, everything I know of California
is shaped like a piece of cardboard
and smells like the black plastic pitch that stretches between Bakersfield & apricots

blue & green & the penny arcade, my dream is just like that:
a thousand miles
long & deep into the otter ice water cliffs

almonds Fresno when I was nearly blond & knees straight
as an arrow & my name
was Dylan-in-the-grass-blue-grass, when my home-
stead read: Mary-of-the-villas
Mary-of-the-beautiful-vocables-of-conch Jalama ice plant and Spanish
moss at its Eastern Boundaries of the Ear
Without answer key or blue fig California
at its goldest gold, brightest bright hues
of citron, sun when the blazing pollen falls all, all California blooms
pornographically, hysterical loyal
daughters of the revolution horses whinnying
up State Street stamp the independence of California into the tarmac Chumash
dancers with fancy feet but
no state.

 

In One-eyed Jacks Marlon Brando and Karl Malden will escape
on steaming ponies, and the beautiful Mexican girl, and roar
into that sleepy village just north of Salinas with its beautiful low Chinese dwarf
cypress in a shady glen & the village is
of Chinese fisher people with grey eyes railroad coolies who bent their backs & did not break in
filmy black & white

Salinas rises from its
valley like a huge dusty mutt mottled
with lettuce and chemicals not of trash in the state’s hallways I want to make you dream this just
as you
made me dream you in a beginning
of bundles and other beginnings

(slash) endings.

 

"Get up you scum-suckin' pig," growls Brando and plays/
a wild card.

•••

 

 

 

 

"For my part I know of no river called Ocean, and I think that Homer, or one of the other poets, invented the name" The sun, therefore, I regard
as the sole
phenomenon

 

Follow the foot-
prints inside the nerve cell; they lead to a bright
door: a tiny patch of memory

a fiery trailer home amidst earlier construction
action heroes collapsing into dust the bus stops
here; there is no buck in this story, not for this hero
except in purely silver quarters smuggled out of the house in the mouth, king snakes
caught in jars

Shields are up. Come the
collectors into the vast coma of our tiny house. We are collecting
dust. They want money. They want to tell us we are not allowed to live in fields in the black
thorax of the bull-infested land

In this dream I will make you take the train
to you dressed up as miles of wooded ocean and coast-
lines with no one on them. You can’t see
old people here because of the sunlight.

Earlier, I had my elbow in the yellowest CA, we talked
about the coin-shaped trapdoors on gastropods, as the possible
version of California slipped away from me
into the geranium, virgin, scraggly
nasturtiums on the fire escape. Here in this living-
room there is no sea. Who

cares about the sea?

I do

because the sea
makes us land-like but think
sea-like to us because I can only ever think

about things swimming there; Dolphindae, Delphinus, herald love
and swiftness

(and the constellation delphinus in the sky)

 

Issuing from the mouth of this animal is a flower: jessant, of a
jerkwater town at the back
of a branch-line train

where runny stars rain by
like eggs, golden
& locked, a hometown is a waiting place, a waiting place is
static inside the heel

I therefore developed longer toes for walking on floating vegetation (jacanidae)
the ancient celadon-and-shining agave lining the path all the way down to the sea

• • •

 

 

 

 

California
gives sqwooshy kisses one by one

the liquid shimmer over the sandpapery surface of the earth

above: hang gliders: huge ribonucleic rubber birds do not remember

Feed me
my archaic needs nights, no truck with

the mysterious curve of the
earth
pulling into
the golden cities

 

and the waves flattened & the waves rise up & increase
their drag & the shore receives them: wave and wave and wave and wave
"And so on and on to the shore…if you think from the sea
and if you think from the shore, it
touches and breaks." Torsion
in the first moebius strip cannot compete with the waves’ amoebic figure 8
and as the course projects happily hypothetically straight from the wave and around
the world mathematically, perfectly ragged the unified-field of wave
and wave & water & pull creature/tide
work out that ideal
the drift of it everything

 

•••

NOTE: A small section of "The California Poem" will appear in the forthcoming issue of Verse.