I
We three park by the Big Sur Road
at Partington Cove,
disregard the furious note
(“All Trespassers Will Be Shot”)
and begin the long, dancing trek
-I mean a zigzag walk
toward the creek,
the tunnel and the Smuggler’s Cave,
hoping to return somewhat more than alive.
In the light air of early
June transistor sounds rise and weave thin
from the stream
where we guess the guard catches fish, or swims.
I’m glad one of us knows the signs
to find the old tunnel.
A large, white half shell
hangs from a branch with a hole
in its middle
(which has been filled with metal),
and a little further on
hangs
a stranger omen woven of many-colored yarn
and shaped like a little kite.
The Indians say it is “God’s eye.”
Now with our shoes off
we soft slosh
across the creek,
toes a school of fish.
A brief, final
push
through the young brush
puts us at the aged tunnel.
The guard is safetly ditched, we hope.
Short trip
through the moist dark
under artful, handhewn
timbers, and suddenly we are born
out onto the brilliant cove
the thieves (and landscape) made a secret of.
II
Hidden as the middle of night
still this cove is bright
as day. The drop is immediate,
sheer to the shimmering sea,
and now you cannot get down
to the little half moon
beach
bleached white. Blackbearded thieves
and smugglers
swagger. Dressed in the ancient leather
they heave and hustle boxes there
and pour
out of a giant demijohn
of green
glass flashing in the sun.
They drink and sing.
They strip and swim
and huddle round the smallfire
on the shore
in their human skin.
Then they dive away and are lost
into the glis
tening eels of water weeds,
brown and supple as a leather whip.
Oh these are men that could make you weep!
We see the great, rusting iron hooks
in stone, and the broken links
of chains they used once to shinny up the rocks.
III
The risk is great around the cliff
beneath the cave of the thief. I almost twist
to my own death
stretched in the sea’s long and stoney bed,
where anemones lie lovely as an egg
and open up their mouths like downy chicks;
where poisoned thorns
pierce the purple flesh of urchins.
We single file about the hill’s edge
and the pointed, dangerous piles
of rock. At last we climb
to the high secret hollow eye
of the cave and drop inside
where the smugglers hid
and stayed
like tears we never shed.
IV
Anxious here, shivering, I find I need to love.
I am the father in the cave,
and I am drunk as Lot was in the shelter
made of skin the day he loved his daughter.
My sons squat in the dark together.
I know they will not hurt each other.
My mind heavily reels in time as I hover
on my haunch like an enormous bird,
And now I rise and stir to find
what I can for lunch
or for our life in this long dark.
The belly of the cave is large!
V
We eat and sleep
and get up to bathe
in light at the mouth of the cave,
while one goes off to think
alone on a point of rock
over the smashing sea. I watch
from my place on the slab of stone
in the sun
beside, where I lie like a lover,
father or mother,
and look over
his naked hills at the black, wandering seas,
or I shift to watch the face
of the sky with its crags
and beards of clouds.
I see the slopes of his weathered head,
and all the tawny
hair along his body
blows
and lifts like shoots
of fern or grass.
Gulls jabber about his nests.
Eyes hold the little lives of the sea
in their pools of blue or grey.
The starfishes of his hands loll and soak
the sun on the rock,
and his foot
juts out
like a foot
shaped cactus plant.
(I want to touch or catch
the thing that lives in the cleft
at the root of the throat.)
Muscles of the belly
break like fields along his golden country!
For like the lost or stolen flesh of God
the self, more alive or more dead,
opens on to the truth
of earth
and sea and sky
and the thieves’ cave yawns empty
of our smuggled body.
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