and I do
I’ve been working on a poem about pilgrimage (complete with references to tidal detritus!). It’s about 3/4 on the page in its earliest form but needs a lot more molding. I took a break to read some older stuff of mine and found this lost child. Enjoy.
[the title of this poem is the sound of the guitar in Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine”]
Car windows down.
At 75
the air hurts coming through,
an unending slap.
The car is old, my paternal grandmother’s.
A Catalina,
sounds breezy and romantic.
It isn’t.
It’s tan.
It’s hot out,
the highway is melting.
I want to slip in,
not return.
Dive down, look for something else,
maybe the real Catalina.
Not really.
I’d been there before –
it was all white people
in shorts and with neat haircuts.
On the dirt road now,
soft air brings in the smell:
Oak trees
Bay leaves
Dust
Dry grass
makes THAT smell:
California.
The radio is all tin
treble.
It takes tapes,
eats them, too.
Neil Young said that
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
And then it was.
I pull over,
dust like a fan behind me,
the Catalina a giant tan peacock
screeching through this
central valley
this heartland
this no man’s land.
In the trunk, a cooler
Full of melting ice and sweating cans.
I hang my hand in the freezing spike,
Come up empty.
The sky is honey now.
Looking at those rolling hills makes me sleepy.
I don’t know what I want.
