The universe seems to be
Very big, and who’s to say
it’s alone.
Somewhere out there,
someone is just like you.
Somewhere out there,
Someone just like you
is walking
With someone like me.
Maybe they aren’t that
far from here.
The cataract grinds away the granite
But water only wants to find a low place
And take the form of its container,
Conform to make its peace.
Earth falls too—
Crashes down on itself
Till the land is level,
At peace.
The wind blows savage over the plain,
Falls from ridge to trough and
The gradient is lost. No high, no low,
No sound but peace.
Fire comes, hungry,
willful, wild;
Thaws frozen seas, steams
Oceans and the rains fall, turns
Air against air and the winds sing;
Heaves continents, piles mountains up,
Sends the peace-loving elements off
to war.
They breathe only what can be inhaled
from others. That is their way.
When you had no more air for them,
their memory of you was a bible.
They buried the book and mourned it
as you lay breathless, solitary,
according to their law.
They encircled their book,
emitting weeping sounds,
embalming it with rose water
and saline solution.
I stepped up secretly, discretely
pushed each one into the hole,
back after back, there not being faces.
The tomb was spacious
(The book was large).
The earth weighed heavily on the spade,
but it rested well upon them.
They have come to no harm, do not cry.
They lie there today,
sipping each other’s air.
A fool question, but a safe one,
he figures.
Wouldn’t want to give her
the wrong idea—or worse yet,
the right one.
“San Paulo,” she answers,
as if he were there, not lost
somewhere between the
eyes and mouth,
where it can be hard
to hear anything.
”That somewhere near
Ipanema?,” he wonders—aloud,
and she laughs, of course, and the heat
rushes to his face, and the colors
drain from the world,
and she smiles and the stars
draw arcs in the lunch-hour sky
‘round her hair, the breeze
blowing all the patio umbrellas
tumbling and laughing
to the sea, o mundo
sorrindo.
I don’t recall how it began
I was asleep at the time
maybe long ago in a boy’s dream or some
half-remembered adventure
wandering again
through that vast and foreign city of childhood
that never once was the same
in so many days and dreams
maybe this time he’d lost someone
I don’t recall
Hearst Avenue or some such
boulevard walking downward
a fenced park to his side an iron gate
concrete path neoclassic façade the
pinkness of granite
the cherrywood doors ajar
Stepping up cold stone by stone
slipped with the night air through the entryway
to the dark inside a broad desk a bronze reading lamp
too dim to penetrate the dense air and a woman
old white hair skin folded in ribbed shadows
in the green lamplight seated at the desk
stood and turned not seeing me walked out from behind
the oak battlement turned his way cocked her head to say
follow me patron and so he did back to the stacks
the green lamplight remained fading at our backs
her ancient wiry frame hung a knee-length dress
black in the green light vanished here and there
as she passed through the shadows of
the densely packed shelves
the knocking of her heels
echoed off the bindings and the floor
her bunned hair was black now in the dim light
the curve of her hips was complete
each leg in fullness but undressed
seeming to note my hesitation she turned back
she was young she was fruitful she
wore the old woman’s dress
but it embraced her now and her glasses had the same frames
but the glass was dark as the stacks somehow I knew
I knew her from somewhere she stopped and turned and
she pulled a book off-shelf handed it to him and
she leaned against the shelving and waited
I looked through the volume all the pages were naked
he looked up to her and showed her two of the empty sheets
she turned away to the stack and reached up
lifting off her heels to her toes
dangerously drew out another volume
I could hardly make out the black silhouette of her face
her hair her dress her calves in the crescent light
her bow-like length flush against the mass of bindings
she pulled the book down and I turned timidly as
she handed the book to him and
I handed the empty book back only to find
the next book was empty so
she led me down the slot canyon handing him
volume after volume of emptiness
sometimes the pages were fresh
white and glossy sometimes they were
yellowed and cracked with time and
the verdant librarian she led me
though the shadow to where the stacks ended at a wall
the shelves there 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 see that
the librarian’s dress though black was not opaque
I could see her through it in the white light as she
handed him the lone book that he could not open
because of what I saw under the linen
some kind of writing
the script glowed dimly in the light in the black fabric
he reached for her collar and turned it out
there was writing
in some Latin form there was another collar
under the collar white and it too had writing and
he turned it over and I saw the deeper layers
and I licked his fingertips and he peeled back the sheets
back as the pages of her breast opened a white rose
the petals turned silently the words
incomprehensible and familiar
he dug through into her pages and I
listened to her breathing clearly
and deeply
with every new page my hands tingle
to the touch of every silk petal
but the fingers begin to quake and stumble
and the pages slip out of their grasp
and the dreamer slips out of the dream
eyes fixed to the ceiling
we listen to the breathing
Ahab found his madness
pulling ‘round Cape Horn,
Bound down before his sirens—
howling Odysseus,
There where the seas broke through
Hyper-extended America, twin
imperialists
Who’d fain stretch themselves thin
as Panama,
Pole to pole to barricade Magellanic
man.
But Patagonia stretched too thin, and the waters
broke the Andean spine,
and the cold blood poured through, pushed
vertebrae out before it,
Warped Patagonia, Antarctica inward
like pincer-horns—a narrow funnel
For all the polar seas
And the southern gales to ride through;
Storms sliding down the Andes,
And beneath the wave crests:
prowling icebergs,
creeping coastal shallows.
Plenty bad with the Roaring Forties,
Furious Fifties riding your back,
But a watery hell with them whistling
‘twixt your nostrils and teeth;
Twice dismasted the Garthwray
Before she finally turned about, sailed
‘round the world to reach Chile
from Argentina;
And Magellan and Drake snuck through,
lost half their ships,
But the Spanish, for their part, preferred
To cross the land and build new fleets
Than rip hull and sail
on the Horn.
Land of the Esselen
Take the bodies of the land and the sea.
Grind them together for thirty million
summers
and something’s bound to chip off.
Look. Not even the heart is left
unscathed;
hunks of Sierran granite spilled
up and down the coast;
the continent’s bones scattered
across the exposed sea floor
from Bodega Head and Point Reyes in
the north,
past the Farallons, Pinos and Lobos
down to that plutonic shard the Spanish
named
“the South,” where you may have heard
an older people, beyond the cliff,
up the canyon, under the shadows
of the white peak, the red giants; who
spoke in ways foreign to their neighbors.
In that country, all was life,
everything thinking;
rock was memory, and nothing
was too inhuman
to have a name.
When it began, in the old land,
Ararat and the noor seed, and the night skin
Cracked, and the sun slipped through,
Fat pomegranate boiling up with red arils
In thousands, and a little snow on the greater cone
Thawed and watered the seed that through March
And June became the noor tree.
A breeze blew through August, October bloomed,
And red orbs grew fat on her slender fingertips,
Loaded down her mighty arms to the earth
And the sun came down from the mountain,
Like pomegranate swelled and cracked,
And doves flew in, cut the red skin and grew
Fat and round on the tree, that bride
Who cast the virile fruit to the ground,
And the aril and the earth and the sun and the snow
Gave birth to Ararat’s children.
Three pomegranates fell down from heaven:
One for the storyteller, one for the listener,
and one for the world.
To the poet Robinson Jeffers, the eagle is a symbol of something like divine consciousness. Man, in contrast, is more like an inauspicious microbe. Man and eagle do have this in common: they both use fire. This is obvious in the case of man. For Jeffers, the eagle is an opportunist, seeking game and carrion in the wake of wildfires.
The key difference between eagle and man—according to Jeffers—can be seen in the poem Original Sin. [1] Man’s rise and fall are identified with one act: man’s harnessing of fire. One might make a case that the chief sin in the poem is man’s cruelty, and human cruelty is surely a sin that Jeffers decries, but there is also a side to Jeffers that laments the rise of civilization, and what better image is there for the rise of civilization than the taming of fire?
The old stories have it that when Zeus got word that Prometheus had given fire to man, Zeus had Prometheus tied down so that an eagle (or vulture) would eternally devour the rebellious Titan’s liver. This punishment might well have seemed justifiable to Jeffers. He did seem to think Prometheus a fool:
And this young man was not of the sad race of Prometheus, to waste himself in favor of the future.[2]
All this original sin is perfectly natural, of course, and we must accept it as such, terrible though it may be.
But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious;
Natural though it all may be, there is tragedy in the powerful knowledge and tools of man as well as in his cruelty. In Original Sin, fire is the symbol for all three.
a trap so baited was laid to catch you when the world began, before the granite foundation [1]
Before the granite was bedded to build the world on [2]
age-reddened granite that was the world’s cradle [3]
One of the themes that appeared in earnest when Robinson Jeffers published Tamar and Other Poems was the stone theme (hawks and eagles didn’t really appear until Cawdor, three releases and four years later). Tamar was published with shorter poems with titles like “To the Rock …” and “To the Stone-Cutters.” The next release, Roan Stallion, began with the poem “Granite and Cypress.”
Stone, for Jeffers, tended to mean granite, and even more specifically sea-granite [4], his term for the exotic granite that pushed up through the marine rock west of the San Andreas Fault. Before the Jefferses purchased those 16 lots at Carmel Point in 1919 [5], it is debatable whether stone ever meant very much to the poet.
Granite is not the dominant bedrock of Carmel-by-the-Sea or of the Central California coast in general. The coastal zone is west of the San Andreas Fault, and so its bedrock is primarily marine in origin. There are, however, exposures of granite throughout the coast of Central California. This granite is exotic to the terrain, as granite is not a marine rock. It is believed to have been sliced off of the Sierra Nevada Batholith many million years ago and moved slowly up the coast along the San Andreas Fault. Thus there is an outcrop of Sierra sea-granite at Carmel Point, and stone throughout Jeffers’s life work.