Six poems: Dawn, Childhood Near Hollywood, Pacific Palisades, Visiting Grandmother, Faces, Flight

Dawn

A socialist health takes hold of the adult,
He is stripped of his class in the bathing-suit,
He returns to the children digging at summer,
A melon-like fruit.
--Delmore Schwartz, “Far Rockaway”

The first boat
out in the water bobs along in the breaking up
of the surface, and holds the course loosely,
battered by waves but seeming to have
as its end a movement toward sunrise:

an orange-yellow, flat, plate-like recurrence
of light on the water encrusted with mist.
The sky has not even started to yellow
or blue, but retains its dull grayish wall-like

plaster of fog the light cuts through,
and so is seeming to come from nowhere
if not sudden. These boaters have brought
with them the expectation and the non-

expectation, the gear and the knowledge that somewhere
beneath this, there is something or nothing,
that non-directing is an aspect of life
as singing is a reversal for fish,

as lovely as drowning, but one never thinks
of that — The father is talking to his boys
with a fog of cigarette smoke as haze-bound
as the sun. His gear is as netted

and intricate as the mess he must work through
every morning, and so brings survival
into this instant of not really looking
forward, for the boat moves by happenstance,

water buffeting it in continuous
resettings of its non-direction
which is relying upon the sameness
and generosity of the sea.

What after all are destinations
for the entangling schools of fish
or wheeling, eyeing gulls, except
a moment of eating from the waters?

Childhood Near Hollywood

Everyday above us
the sun languished, lazing its way
across the sky like some skimpy
bikini-clad model on a tire.

We pictured sunglasses on the sun
to let it keep its glare to itself

but even then we suspected
its need to drink in sustenance
and so drew a stream
between sun and ocean
then hooted with laughter
as children do
and drew sex organs on the sun

then in a frenzy my little brother
scribbled across everything

and yelled out, "Los Angeles!"
The room filled with the screaming clutter

of every street corner god or huckster.
By now we were mad.
We were running around
tearing up pictures: the sun and moon
we had been drawing that afternoon

when my brother yelled "cut!"
and we started with scissors
along the curtains
and then the veneer
of the antique Italian desk. Left alone

we children were terrors, and would not atone
for our actions, or acting.

It all had to end when mother called.

We went out and piled in the station wagon,
leaving our small disaster.
When evening approached, waving flags of surrender,
we grew up and left,
yet still the sea

surrenders its life up to a sun
that boils each heaven to a bone.

Pacific Palisades

That place teetered like a grandmother.
It seemed a mix of ash and flesh —
color, sentiment, and ancient sea.

I, a child climbing that face,
knew nothing about those cliffs
not found through finding and losing footing —

only how the coast formed
its hazard there, and fell toward oceans
in soft moldings of debris.

Here and there, random patches
of buried highway peeked from detritus
near the chain link fence

past which construction of the new road
continued beside a chameleon ocean
always changing, according to the sky.

What were these weathering fabulations
of mud? Hard enough to scramble on;
they powdered underfoot;

the scree slid as you plunged down
into the wreckage of the coast,
a soft announcement of the mountains

rising at the far end of the plateau.
Each year the rain cut off slices of cliff,
trying to push the sea away,

but water was always smarter and had
no sense of shame. It waited across the highway
while the road crews cleared out the rubble,

and above, the demolition teams
took down the houses left dangling over
or too near the drop for habitation.

That place was terraces, yarrow, chaparral,
clad in sunlight, a rough skin of cracking mud,
a constellation of pebbles in clay

that, like a grandmother, spent days remembering
how the land and sea had once kissed.

Visiting Grandmother

I’d sit beneath the Italianate cabinet,
flicking the hanging handles of the drawers—

each one a flowered loop and tit
with an arabesque piercing of brass. I could handle

this fascination, thoughtless metallic
working;
clack, clack, they snag on antique plackets

joined to the cherry dark wood. The pitches
differed, one a half-tone higher.

My grandmother, in lace frock and black, tight necklace
with a small cameo at the front,

said that I looked like Troy Donahue.
She was speaking to my father.

He had brought me, kid-blonde and awkward,
down coast to see her in her beachside apartment

filled with the burnish of her life.
She was passing out of existence.

Driving home,
safe on the back seat
of the Plymouth coupe,

the tires humming on the scored coastal road,
I would start to enter the world of sleep
that keeps pitching back on itself,

where dream
and waking become the same. My grandmother,
pale as the small ghost housed in the cameo egg at her throat,

would speak to me
of the dreams of the world that we all are leaving,

that cannot be explained. I was riding
up to the coast on a wave as Troy Donahue
might surf his way to another beginning
TV series. This was the shape

of consciousness. Her smile grew red
with lipstick, her chin forming a canyon
of cracked, ridged flesh that was now easing
into the brooch, and the pink-pale face

of the cameo kept on looking sideways
into an even more distant world.

Faces

A rust of red sandstone, silken in outcropping,
lay past the pavement's edge that year,
a face lifting from the bite
the landslide had taken from the road.
Yarrow and sagebrush clumped some yards farther,
then all plunged toward cracked, brittle courses,
curled old parchments of mud
dried in the washed-out gullies.

We called it the land of a thousand faces,
for soon that summer the children
started carving the pliant sandstone,
drawn as if by custom;

first came trenches for plastic soldiers,
then came the faces--demons, pirates, clowns,
then sphinxes and strange arabesques
til the silt came to seem pocking in kinship

with the sediments of distant mountains,
equally marked,
another history,
where pebbles that reach the sea roll out,
leaving holes in the eyeless land,
soft breakings from deep slopes of earth
into what washes away.
We scrambled on the escarpment,
bearing toys and talismans;

then winter came. Storms reeled from the tropics.
In long days at school,
protected while outside waters hurled,
I thought of how Gods have a way of passing,

of how Jesus said he could save us
if we were good enough. After one storm,
the cliff fell toward waters. That Sunday, at church,
A priest spoke of houses built on sand.

Flight
for my father

It is again as it is
in the places that I have left
before night falls, and I sit
in the configuration
of stars and the lights of aircraft passing
away from the city into the blue
and blackening sky that stretches farther
than I have ever given thought
to wander. My father, hand
on the back porch railing,
wants it to be as it is;
I can see him looking
into the deepening well
of darkness. I can see
the way his fingers fidget
along the cool, black iron
of the banisters.
If he could speak, I know
he would mention the chance
that summer could be here,
that we could be coming home
to sit together again.
I know he would be looking
for a way to tell me
that he is happy or sorry
for everything, for the way
night brings its dark wing
over us, and the distant lights
of aircraft blink down
to the orange edge of the day
that is quietly dying
into the black of the sea.
He would like to think of the way
an aircraft becomes a star,
filled with the luck of horizons
until there is no going home.