On the ‘Aha Makhav
there is plenty of sun,
but not so much fire.
Look to where the sea clouds
spray the earth, there
the sun stores his spark
in grass, shrub, and tree,
bakes them till
it escapes.
When our son Michael was ten years old, he’d been given a school assignment to find two poems. When I saw what Michael had selected, I was a little surprised. Soon after that, his teacher reported to us that Michael’s choices weren’t appropriate for 5th grade. They were both Jeffers poems. If memory serves, one of them was Shine, Perishing Republic—let’s just say not exactly the Pledge of Allegiance. The other involved a woman torturing a horse. Admittedly, I was amused that our son had got into a bit of trouble because I’d left Robinson Jeffers lying around the house. Not Hustler magazine—Robinson Jeffers: environmental visionary, nature mystic, prophet, poet of California.
The poem with the woman torturing the horse, titled Apology for Bad Dreams, is reportedly based upon actual events, but that’s really beside the point. People are sometimes cruel. We know that. Why, then, is Jeffers so tenacious about telling these stories about sin and mayhem? Is it just that sensationalism sells? Sex and violence, after all, had been good to Jeffers. This is the critique of his work that this dark poem seems to answer.
I
When Jeffers had his house built at the Point,
He had it made to last, with local stuff—
Exotic sea-granite conveyed from the Sierra
Up the San Andreas and hauled by horse
From a nearby quarry he called the sea.
He even helped with the work, and then
he added on a tavern, and
Gemmed it with non-native things
Taken from temples, tombs and poets and kings
from all around the world.
A man needs a car, and a car needs a home,
So he made his car a house of stone
he wheeled from the sea.
A man needs a dog, and a dog needs a fence,
So he raised a wall of slow-cooked stones
he fetched up from the sea.
A man needs a wife, and a wife needs a tower,
So he built her a sea-stone turret, and he had it
lined with fine mahogany; décor’d
With Hindu heads, precious tiles, and sacred stones
Pinched from poets, walls, and temples and tombs
from all around the world.
And of the sea stones, the poet built poems
About his house, his cliffs, and his tower,
but not about the loot.
II
When Henry built his cabin in the woods,
He made it of native white pine that he felled himself,
plus some secondhand brick.
He moved in, raised some beans,
Watched the trains steam by,
Surveyed the pond, and after a couple years,
Collected his journals,
walked back to Concord.
His father was a preacher.
His mother was a poem.
Maybe he was raised by Mars
And taught to see by stone.
He didn’t wander Sinai
Or immolate a bush.
He didn’t build a giant boat
Or feed a giant fish.
He built a pulpit
With his hands
And granite
From the sea.
He stacked the rock
From ground to God
Right up to forty feet.
For forty years he prophesied
With verses for his robes.
The people called him poet,
But everybody knows.
The boy doesn’t like girls,
but then he’s only eleven.
He’s very punctual about school attendance,
always leaving by twenty after,
never a minute later.
That’s far more than he needs to get to school on time.
I guess he gets in a basketball game before class
(you know, boys).
Sometimes he forgets his homework or
his house key, but
he’s always gone by twenty after.
This morning I took the dog out for a walk
just past twenty after.
We snuck up on the boy—
just for kicks,
and the dog caught him with his snack bag open
(the dog likes jerky too), and I noticed
across the street, down on the corner
a girl was standing—just standing, waiting for someone?
After I finally pulled the dog off the scent,
The girl yelled to the boy, “Is that your dog?”
And that’s when it finally hit me.
Sneaky devil.
Above the porcelain font
and the laughing gargoyle,
the stone words warn,
Do not feed the fool.
So thoughtless to let his heart
off its leash
for your modest gift,
to let his eyes be detained
by the gentle glint
of your mercy.
Beneath the dim glow
Between night and day,
Before the storm,
The lioness retreated
To the creekside wood.
He turned from the reptilian
Alto-stratus in the high, blue east
To the storm-laden west
And blinked.
A flash of coral pink
On rock, tree, and meadow
That somehow
Missed the sky?
He whipped around in surprise;
High clouds catching fire
Over the east, somehow
Casting deeper shadow on the land,
And towering over the west:
A narrow arc of refracted daylight
Glowing in the final breath of darkness
Like an answer.
I awoke from a striking dream this morning before dawn. I’m not sure how it began. It seemed to be another one of those dreams in which I’m wandering through a strange but familiar city. Perhaps I had lost someone. I don’t recall.
Anyway, I was walking down an empty street along what appeared to be a fenced park when I encountered a gate. Looking through the gate, I saw a building—a large, neoclassical building. It looked to be made of red—or pink—granite. As I approached the building, I saw its large double doors. They were a darker red—cherry wood, perhaps. I ascended the steps and found that one of the doors was slightly ajar, so I opened it and stepped inside.
It was a library, and a rather dark one at that. Opposite the entrance, just before me about twenty feet away, there was a broad desk with a dim lamp, inhabited by an elderly woman. She looked up, and hardly seeming to notice me, stood and walked out from behind the desk, whereupon she turned back toward me and cocked her head as if to say, “this way.” So I followed her.
The librarian led me back to the stacks, where the light was even more dim than it had been at the entrance. Her wiry frame held up a black, knee-length dress. It vanished here and there as she passed through the shadows of the more densely packed shelves. The tapping of her heels echoed off the hardwood floor.
Somewhere I noticed a change: her hair was black in the dim light. “Hadn’t it been grey?” I asked myself. Then the curve of her hips: it was suddenly full and smooth. I dared to examine her calves. I stopped momentarily to verify what I had just seen. Seeming to notice my hesitation, she turned back toward me. It was true: she was younger, and she was beautiful. She wore the same dress, and the same spectacles, only now the dress seemed tailored for her body’s curves, and her glasses framed her eyes as though they were two twin gems in some crime movie. Something about her was unearthly, yet she was quite familiar.
The librarian stopped and turned, and she pulled a book off the shelf, handed it to me, and then she leaned against the shelving and waited. I looked through the book. All the pages were blank. I looked up to her and showed her two of the empty pages. She turned toward the stack and reached up, standing on her toes, and slowly pulled out another volume. I could barely make out the black silhouette of her dress in the darkness, stretching flush against the mass of volumes. She pulled the book down and I shyly turned away as she handed the book to me. I handed her back the book with the blank pages, and I soon discovered the book she had just handed me was the same: there was nothing in it.
So it went. She led me down the narrow canyon of shelves, handing me volume after volume of emptiness. Sometimes the pages were fresh, white, and even glossy. Sometimes they were yellowed with time.
The young librarian eventually led me to where the stacks ended at a wall. The shelves there were empty but for a single book. I could see this clearly in the light of a naked bulb that shone from high on the wall. I could also see that the librarian’s dress, though black, was not entirely opaque. I could see through it in the light as she handed me the lone book.
But I didn’t open the book because of what I saw all over her dress. It was some kind of writing. The script glowed dimly in the light. It was glowing from within the black fabric. I reached for her collar and turned it out. There was writing, sure enough, in Spanish, I thought, but then I noticed it wasn’t Spanish. There was another collar under the collar of the dress. It was white, and it too had writing, and I turned it over and then—I noticed there were more layers underneath.
I dampened my fingertips and peeled the layers back as the pages of her breast opened like a white rose. The pages turned silently. The words, being in that foreign tongue, were incomprehensible—yet familiar, maybe the words of a song or a poem. As I dug more and more deeply into her pages I could hear her breathing, more and more clearly with every page. My hands thrilled to the touch of each cool sheet, but my fingers began to tremble and stumble. The pages slipped out of their grasp, and I awoke.
My eyes stared up at the ceiling, and I listened to my wife’s rhythmic breathing.
“The gods indeed did not choose rightly …” —Ahunavaiti Gatha
The clouds rumbled.
“Bastard! Devil!,” a bearded man screamed at the sky.
The mountain wind whipped his hair across his face.
The hair was not grey, but the face was not young.
He looked around,
surveying the black bellies of the thunderheads
gathered around the mountain.
The man turned his eyes back to heaven.
A smile spread from his cheeks to his eyes.
He inhaled deeply.
A mad laugh burst out of him,
and he shouted at heaven.
“You dare not kill me, you fool!”
and he shook his head.
With a lower voice, he began to speak as though
he were talking to another man on the summit.
“Death is my ally. Death—
is my power over you.”
His voice elevated as he continued:
“Kill me and you have nothing!”
Now he began to whisper, as if to a confidant.
“My friend. You and I know of powers
greater than the thunderbolt.
Greater than flood! Drought!
… If you do not kill me now, I will tell the others.”
A flash struck the peak to the south, and then a crack split the air.
“You — MISSED!” The first man screamed, laughing,
but then the wind subsided, and
his face grew more solemn.
“You know, we too
have harnessed fire.”
He knew her best,
I have no doubt of it.
And didn’t he name her better
Than did the Spaniards? Hah!
What did they know?
They never even approached her.
Today I received another incident report
From the Range. She has
taken to burning again.
It’s inevitable.
If you’ve ever walked her wooded elevations
on a day like this, under the faithful
California sun,
you might reckon the thickets and the woods to be
on the threshold of ignition.
What isn’t burning is baking.
You can smell it.
The cold fire of alpenglow on the high peaks,
That is a reminder.
I remember, John, how you waited out a mountain
fire in the charred heart of a Sequoia,
that Giant among giants who needs
a little fire now and then.
I would have liked to have been on Paradise Ridge,
there with you, that night.
I would have been waiting, a little nervously,
for the right time to say,
Now tell me
you never considered
Range of Fire.