Half a Dime

Between the pavement & the ocean sky
              just steps from where the coast
                              road cuts its sectioned asphalt bleached
by the sun & fogs & vibroned tire treads
              of who knows how many cars and trucks
                              careening into the mist
we parked & stumbled to find a steep
              crooked sandy trail
                                                down from panoramic cliffs

              intervals of rusty eucalyptus
                              gargling the seabreeze
                                                                like a flooded carburetor

                              A neat pile of regurgitated fishbones
                              in the center of the path
                              like a nest of crystals in the sun

Another time I lost my sunglasses here

                                                inside mineshafts of raw pacific steel

                              between the spanking cold & the damp

so that I had to blink to remember my name
& offshore breezes whispered so deciduously into the vast
unobserved platitude of ocean haze
something that was indicated or that could only be read upon the rusted dashboard dials of a derelict Buick
rotting & sunken
decapitated in a ragged seaside vacant lot
adjacent to the tideflat
as in ancient crime scene photographs where detectives stand
& a uniformed patrolman points
the lurid implication of what lies hidden in the weeds

              but in the sand gravel parking lot
              where the pavement gleams wetly out of the past
              seems set like a jewel in the last stretch of land before
              the heaving Pacific
                                                swept in red sunset turquoise
              drizzled in the milk of alleyways purpled w/blood or mist
                              swamped in a brown corner by Rembrandt
              with simple manifestations of allegorical contingencies
                                                trembling like a drop of dew in anticipation
              maybe Golgothas & la luz de Oriente
                              flying in off the lip of the Pacific
              night & day crashing the sunburned sidewalk
              the sky rocking back on its heels

                              between the dancer & the dance

              waiting for the tide to wrap in around the jetty

                              drifting
                                                                half your life at least
                                                the half you can still remember

              & it was like silk or aluminum out there
at that depth & from the rolling surface tension lifted
shallow roses & a deeper gloom than all your Topangas
                              shrouded in smoke & mist of Aztec or
                                                Abyssinian origin but with hula girls
tragic on a sand road in the lemon dusk
              vacant & inexcusable except for the
                                                way their hips move & the rustling of
                              grass skirts like the rainy cape of pneumatic
                              kelp groves rocking underwater to the
                                                                swoop & dazzle of ocean tides
              counting one-1,000 / two-1,000 / three--
              until you get there
              the sum total of the ground upon which you stagger
              & the bubbling under