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.