Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Big Sur

from clouds, leaves, waves. 1996

Yosemite, with stars at night,
an unearthly cold,
constellations like snow,
closer to original stories
the falls and clouds, rain and snow,
high above, then...

flowing to a sea, the Big Sur,
waves and distances
teetering on an edge
Pfieffer Beach, a rock, splash-- a wave.
Painting the sun,
going down in the Pacific.
A wild place,
cold, windy and disorienting,
later, rocking to sleep, feeling
as if having stepped off a boat.

Seeing Tioga pass at night,
polar sky to grey. Stars, a frightening
cold, silence and distance,
solitary, peeing at night, looking up--
back in bed, warmer, a familiar Dipper
out the window
shining through a darker pine.

A voyager in wide spaces
on a Western Jaunt,
into Blue Imagination---
distant Yosemites, Surs...
Walt, this moment, in the Sun.




Big Sur, a home for now...
puttering a bit, here
among the Surs, diving to the ocean
down on the beach, the rocks, waves.
A sunset from the coast road.

“Adventures and Wonder”--
scrawled on my paint box, enthralled!

A fantasy it seemed,
painting... a crack--
a tree... crashing down,
alone in the woods... I was painting
the overlooking view.

Hiking again to the falls
and painting them at closer range,
doing this with my friend.

Western Jaunt,
the space of the Imagination
the American Adam
starting out
Adventure and Wonder.

As the end must be made,
for a new beginning.


from Road Movie 2000

ARTIST
dressed in black, obviously lost-- wild
in thought and deed, he had made a
sappy painting of the view, the front yard,
the Big Sur

where Jack Kerouac groped from the highway
up the creek bed, drunk and wild
'the search for soul' wearing thin by this time
in alcoholic hero,

none of these goings on will be broadcast
on GOOD MORNING AMERICA
the confession, the spots of flesh,
the destruction, in drugs, sex, the rock and roll--
it adds a dimension

the dark rumbling,
lost in, rumbling, but to believe--
is to crawl out of the deep. to a shallow hope
is to look up-- the grimy light-- these directions of up
and out, have stung me.

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