The Mustard Field
I used to write poems. Tons of them. Now I focus on prose and shift back to poetry when I need to reset, to get back to the mouth-feel of words and that distillation.
This is a poem I wrote a while back about my earliest memory: the field of wild mustard down the road from the house my parents lived in when I was born. This was in Los Gatos, California, a town that has changed drastically since my arrival in the mid 1970s. What was once an odd little mountain town between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz is now an upscale Silicon Valley suburb full of chain stores and not enough parking. My California doesn’t exist anymore, I fear. That’s pretty much why I split.
Anyway, here’s the poem:
The Mustard Field Rambles
Think back, you.
Think back as far as you can.
There I am.
In the empty black magnet of memory
I am the originator.
Dust and pollen
baking in the sun,
I’m golden, burning,
a yellow so pure, I’ll scorch your eyes.
You’ll never erase me,
I’m your oldest memory.
The melted gold of California poppies ring me,
a corona.
You are at the end of the road —
newly paved, an inky black —
the heat dancing
clear shimmy between us.
I’ll stand for everything
from that time in your life:
What you know from photographs
bonneted and crawling
chubby-legged on a patch quilt
the grass beneath in wide blades of
brittle British racing green
What you’ve been told
your mother in the shed
piecing smoky crimson, cobalt
glass together
listening to The Dead
your father on the roof
sawing, finishing
full of beer and about to
tumble lazily into the hedge
What you feel
this was the start
where you started
it is what came before
what will someday be
I’m always in the distance,
the farthest thing you see.
Tinker with it,
make memory more,
and you’re sitting with me
the hair on your head
muddy reflection of gold
just below my highest points.
I am all you’ll really know
a dusty, ripe myth.
I’m plowed through now,
a ghost under someone’s home,
gone.
