#monterey - Hello Poetry

Steinbeck’s restless ghost whispers to me as I tiptoe along a stone seawall. He steers me away from the bay back to the old sandstone churches built by native hands, back to music festivals and artisan fairs full of mild, white cheeses and would-be novelists arguing about Henry Miller’s tropics. But I’ve grown tired of his whispering and no longer wish to dream of these things. I would rather descend into a watery haven. I will wave goodbye to John and I will run down sandy paths that lead to the sea. I wade into the depths and sink into a canyon where kelp shivers in underwater breezes, and the only stars I see will be suction-cupped to the rocks below.

0

Jan 5, 2021

Jan 5, 2021 at 9:02 PM UTC

cjchaffin

dreams of Monterey

Steinbeck’s restless ghost whispers to me as I tiptoe along a stone seawall. He steers me away from the bay back to the old sandstone churches built by native hands, back to music festivals and artisan fairs full of mild, white cheeses and would-be novelists arguing about Henry Miller’s tropics. But I’ve grown tired of his whispering and no longer wish to dream of these things. I would rather descend into a watery haven. I will wave goodbye to John and I will run down sandy paths that lead to the sea. I wade into the depths and sink into a canyon where kelp shivers in underwater breezes, and the only stars I see will be suction-cupped to the rocks below.

20

Sometimes there's something jarringly disparate About the fresh sea salt fog and the beauty queen moon of the Monterey wharf. Sometimes you need the painfully cold sludge of a Cleveland street with no sidewalks and the crying skeletons of trees to match your black coffee soul.

0

Apr 20, 2019

Apr 20, 2019 at 11:21 PM UTC

EtherealEyes

Tourist Town

Sometimes there's something jarringly disparate About the fresh sea salt fog and the beauty queen moon of the Monterey wharf. Sometimes you need the painfully cold sludge of a Cleveland street with no sidewalks and the crying skeletons of trees to match your black coffee soul.

2

When we were eighteen the valley of the plums, prunes and apricots kept us beaming. I had come from the north, from the nuclear town on the Columbia River. I never yearn for the desert sand in the wind, or the feeling that above and beyond the first mountain men were doing things not meant for the rest of the world to view, except that one of those men was my father. The company moved us to the new place, the California farm town. Here the soil, worked hard by orchardists, yielded a sweet aroma that persuaded us to be fond of the earth. We would go to school and work the summer jobs, slicing cots and stuffing fruit in cans all night, and then I would fall in love. That is where the “we” enters. I drove an old English sports car with a wooden frame and wire-spoked wheels, a windshield that would drop down for a full dose of the highway wind. Dwellers arrived here quickly from afar. Some said it was for the weather. Never very hot or cold, an incubational paradise for the thousands of acres of fruit teees. We had to stand back from the evening bonfires, and were sorrowful, watching the fruit trees chopped, piled and torched. This progress made me think of the American Indians. I had seen them netting salmon on the Columbia River at Celilo Falls before the dams, the gray concrete walls that turn gravity into a light bulb. (I would like to flip a switch and turn on the river). We asked ourselves what would be the limits of this 1960s unbridled growth. Some were talking of expanding to the moon, while we were considering holing up in a mountain retreat. The valley of the fruit became unrecognizable. Next in my neighborhood a multi-story building slammed into the sky. If even one could be built here, why not one more Hong Kong? We drove to the mountains in the spring when the western slopes filled with wild flowers, and flew kites and laughed into the face of the oncoming wind, and kissed. Love might conquer all. The ocean side of the range is where we knew we wanted to be. Riding waves and kicking around in the kelp beds at Pleasure Point. Less room for a building boom, unless steel platforms were erected over the waves. Who knows that such an idea is even now on the drawing boards. We married and made the move and remain there still. A tiny house built during one of the greater wars of the last century by Hawaiian flower farmers, who knew nothing about how to build a sturdy house, and had no blossom money for their dreams. My dream is awake there though, the little house and the tiny rooms that only want to hear the birds of the forest come near. Daffodils and roses, enormous zucchinis, and an old pear tree that I write poems about in the spring, and two girls who love the ocean. That’s about it. My whole autobiography composed this bright sunny morning in the hills above San Luis Reservoir in the central valley, where I come from time to time to write and ponder the tall grass. My parents are close by in the national veteran’s cemetery, where I put them a few sad years ago. I see some of the details are missing. It’s easy to fill in the missing information–the story most of us might tell. We’ve wept over the loss of farms, flowing rivers, and fought the war against the war, and wondered why we cannot just live in a teepee at the base of Yosemite Falls. In the background, a steady trickle of death, disease, work. I am guilty of confusing work with death and disease, but that’s just my own hard-earned opinion. There have been birthday cakes and communions, bicycle rides and Monterey fish eating, candles burning in winter storms, old tool sheds full of her paintings, a stack of notebooks with my scribbling. The valley of the fruit continues stacking buildings. The redwoods here continue growing.

0

Apr 24, 2015

Apr 24, 2015 at 9:42 PM UTC

tom-mccubbin

Autobiography

When we were eighteen the valley of the plums, prunes and apricots kept us beaming. I had come from the north, from the nuclear town on the Columbia River. I never yearn for the desert sand in the wind, or the feeling that above and beyond the first mountain men were doing things not meant for the rest of the world to view, except that one of those men was my father. The company moved us to the new place, the California farm town. Here the soil, worked hard by orchardists, yielded a sweet aroma that persuaded us to be fond of the earth. We would go to school and work the summer jobs, slicing cots and stuffing fruit in cans all night, and then I would fall in love. That is where the “we” enters. I drove an old English sports car with a wooden frame and wire-spoked wheels, a windshield that would drop down for a full dose of the highway wind. Dwellers arrived here quickly from afar. Some said it was for the weather. Never very hot or cold, an incubational paradise for the thousands of acres of fruit teees. We had to stand back from the evening bonfires, and were sorrowful, watching the fruit trees chopped, piled and torched. This progress made me think of the American Indians. I had seen them netting salmon on the Columbia River at Celilo Falls before the dams, the gray concrete walls that turn gravity into a light bulb. (I would like to flip a switch and turn on the river). We asked ourselves what would be the limits of this 1960s unbridled growth. Some were talking of expanding to the moon, while we were considering holing up in a mountain retreat. The valley of the fruit became unrecognizable. Next in my neighborhood a multi-story building slammed into the sky. If even one could be built here, why not one more Hong Kong? We drove to the mountains in the spring when the western slopes filled with wild flowers, and flew kites and laughed into the face of the oncoming wind, and kissed. Love might conquer all. The ocean side of the range is where we knew we wanted to be. Riding waves and kicking around in the kelp beds at Pleasure Point. Less room for a building boom, unless steel platforms were erected over the waves. Who knows that such an idea is even now on the drawing boards. We married and made the move and remain there still. A tiny house built during one of the greater wars of the last century by Hawaiian flower farmers, who knew nothing about how to build a sturdy house, and had no blossom money for their dreams. My dream is awake there though, the little house and the tiny rooms that only want to hear the birds of the forest come near. Daffodils and roses, enormous zucchinis, and an old pear tree that I write poems about in the spring, and two girls who love the ocean. That’s about it. My whole autobiography composed this bright sunny morning in the hills above San Luis Reservoir in the central valley, where I come from time to time to write and ponder the tall grass. My parents are close by in the national veteran’s cemetery, where I put them a few sad years ago. I see some of the details are missing. It’s easy to fill in the missing information–the story most of us might tell. We’ve wept over the loss of farms, flowing rivers, and fought the war against the war, and wondered why we cannot just live in a teepee at the base of Yosemite Falls. In the background, a steady trickle of death, disease, work. I am guilty of confusing work with death and disease, but that’s just my own hard-earned opinion. There have been birthday cakes and communions, bicycle rides and Monterey fish eating, candles burning in winter storms, old tool sheds full of her paintings, a stack of notebooks with my scribbling. The valley of the fruit continues stacking buildings. The redwoods here continue growing.

71