El Camino Del Mar at Dusk
First published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue
by
Happy Autumnal Equinox to all in the Northern Hemisphere! There is a certain peculiar feeling I get at the autumnal turn. It's a gestalt, a felt sense, some kind of suchness or maybe haecceity of this change, like I can feel the shift of the entire world though the complete combination of all the little shifts all together. Actually, to call it a feeling would imply it's an emotion only and that's entirely too single-dimensional a sense of the thing. It is both stronger and more subtle than that. Because of this ineffable but recurrent sense of this moment, I have written multiple poems trying to eff it, as it were. The poem I'm sharing today is part of that spontaneously-arising series (so is The Photograph We Didn't Take at Baker Beach).
"El Camino Del Mar at Dusk" was first published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue.
El Camino Del Mar at Dusk #
The sun has just set and a lavender haze
glows behind the darkening silhouettes
of cypresses that lean away from the shore.
Seagulls’ cries cut through
the far-below breakers,
and sparrows spill from bush to bush,
chirping the ingathering call of evening.
At the Land’s End labyrinth families
are still trying to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge.
The startled moon has been tossed into the sky,
and I think it will light my way,
but redwoods and bushes and blackberry brambles
form a dim tunnel where raccoons rustle.
Darkness gathers at the feet of giant fennel
and danger smells like black licorice.
At last, I emerge at the trailhead where the Legion of Honor
columns are all lit up for the evening,
and a fountain out front conceals
the sound of the ocean,
and the gray path snakes downhill
to the city made of beaded lights.