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FIREBREAKS
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JUST JOKING
Frivolity is the species refusal to suffer.
—John Lahr
This morning I am fifty one
(Maybe a third of a tank left)
And all the read and spoken words of thirty years
Spill like the urgently indifferent tides at Rio del Mar.
Only the gags seem somehow to hang on.
Talking Kant with Thalberg was a rich mix,
Fueling a friendship with heady afternoons,
But always it was best when we strayed
Into the preposterous, sometimes
Laughing until the dogs down in the garden digging,
Looked quizzically back at us with adobe-caked noses.
At Father Dunne’s the argument was Grace,
Which took us late into the merlot hours.
I could not buy his gentle certainties,
But ending those nights swapping limericks
Among the jittering sycamores
Sealed us friends to the grave.
I think what it comes to is
the bewildered heart in us,
Which year by year measuring our slim attainments
With mounting despair, still feeds
In its recesses some faint hope, despite
The certain knowledge that what it hopes for
Cannot change the tide,
And in these moments, a joke,
shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul,
Needs no defense.
MY POEM IN THE LOBBY AT HEWLETT PACKARD
A Steuben ashtray blinked disdainfully,
daring my Kool to near; my lyric hope
lay buried there on coffee table oak.
I knew The Atlantic by an exposed corner
of famed masthead, composed beneath the shout
of well-thumbed Newsweek, much-consulted Forbes.
No need of exhumations, I had seen
the comers’page where Plath’s poem paired with mine:
heraldings of exiles yet to come.
Truth was our hope of haven then, not death
nor the false calm of corporate mooring posts,
yet there I stood on a sea of Tyrian shag,
my interview splashing out to anchor me.
In recommended pitch I bobbed and belled
alert, computable energy for hire.
MONTEREY COUNTY
1.
Sun a part of it and not,
scent of cypress
gusting down cliffs
clothed in sea thunder:
a draught of November year
'round.
Black gulls sit on the sea,
and nettles, sovereign
of inshore summer silences,
roll out in copper waves
to meet the ocean wave.
Like every native boy, I
heartily climbed these rocks
as fat as kings, and studied
the momentary pools
composed no more of water
than wind, and for hours
took the rock crab's view of things.
2.
Slick clouds
clatter into our sky
like ice blocks into
a punch bowl.
With the thunder—rain—wind,
stingers of cold that ream the black
furrows of the fields,
and blast the sagged barley,
scruffing the thatch of anxious
goats bunched on
high ground.
We walk wet swollen earth,
you small, glistening,
holding my thoughts as if
they were my hand.
3.
Foundering windmills creak
a few stiff turns at the sky,
pumping only the rising fog
of afternoon. Repeatedly
they are halting, checking
their joints for life.
The old barns, bleached
and battered by a century of fury
from the sea, still breathe
through their scars. They groan
and sway like alcoholics,
dazed at the unguessed
emptiness of years.
4.
I had stood on the cliff
a long while
waiting the black
movements
of a pelican who slept
in the rocks
below the wind.
He was oily and slept
with mustard-seed eyes
trained on my cliff.
When the wind dropped
he stood, turning,
calling until the night and the sea
caught him as one more
black rock.
5.
I could tell you of a
dark silent kitchen
in Castroville where
love once lived,
then hardened
like a steaming dishcloth
in sill frost.
6.
Strawberry pinks and clarets
quilt the valley as far as eye can see,
even to the first pined up-turnings
of the mountains of Santa Lucia.
Beside the potholed two-lane,
tailgates down for the harvest,
old pickups doze under new paint:
cherry red, patent leather black.
Teeth flash. Proud Latino heads
bend in tableau to the picking.
They seem not to notice me, but I
know better and wave Godspeed
as I trespass through the
birthright of their silence.
7.
Tomorrow I will go up
to Watsonville
and drink with a Mexican
widow I know,
and later
in the side streets—
the drinking and the
lying done with—
we'll listen to
the leather sounds
of the old houses
riding easily
by the artichoke fields
under the wind,
before we climb
through her rock garden
to her fire.
MOORE MORAN'S
poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Threepenny Review,
Yale Review, New Letters and elsewhere. His first book of poems, FIREBREAKS,
won the 1999 National Poetry Book Award and was
published by Salmon Run Press in May.
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