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California

William Carpenter 
I think of the California poets,
how easy it is for them.
They have vast open spaces,
they drive jeeps and live nowhere,
they drift from cabin to cabin
on mountains with beautiful Spanish names
and there are girls in the cabins
who love poetry and sleep with the poets freely,
for in California there is no guilt nor shame
nor hunger, life is as a dream,
lobsters crawl up on the shore to be caught,
they shoot seabirds and fry them in butter on the beach.

There are no seasons in California.
You make your own, you move from
places where the sun shines all the time
to places where it rains or snows forever.
If you want June or October or some cross-country skiing,
you go to that place in your jeep
and the season is there always.

It is a good climate for poetry, since it is full
of images. You pluck them from the trees like breadfruit
with your feet or knock them down like coconuts.
It is good also for religion, as the Three Winds
bring secret doctrines from the East,
sesnsual and voluptuous names for the emotions,
creeds that make holy your underground desires,
your daily habits and the parts of your body.

In New England we scratch in the soil with sticks,
find scarce turnips among the rocks,
have no religion at all, fence out our neighbors,
wear clothes, work hard, abstain from sex
and write poems, when we do, on the way to the madhouse.

I spent some time in Midwest, where they
were neither wholly free nor wholly tragic.
They lived, screwed, married, divorced and died
like regular folk. They grew corn and fed it to
their pigs, then shipped them east and west
for slaughter. It made sense.
When I am finished with this rocky ground,
wet weather and neurotic ocean,
I will become a Baptist in Des Moines,
rise early and drive out to the river
to watch the fall migrations.
I will take photographs and keep
a family album, with no poems, for poems,
Maine or California, drive you crazy.
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