rinsemiddlebliss

Photo of blackberry leaves turning red and splotchy . Own work 2020.

El Camino Del Mar at Dusk

First published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue

by AK Krajewska

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.