Carmel: Point Lobos

To Thomas Sanchez
“It’s called God,” you said.
You are young and you had
walked or flown ahead
to the violent crag.
“When I see beauty like this
I want to die for it.”
Jump
to the far rock home
where the white, roiling foam
seethes,
rolls one eddy on another, and retreats
to lie still
in a momentary peace or pool.
A little way above and to the left, the gull
folks form
quiet lines of their own.
They wait along the brilliant height,
and then, when it’s time,
fling them
selves off into the wide
arcs and dips of their angelic suicides.
Against the overcast skies
their wings and bodies
weave
a gentle, shifting spiral figure
as of light-like the faster
nebulae of froth along the blue black water.
Suddenly the sun is out! and colors
brighten all about the iridescent Point
with its prehistoric birds and plants,
Santa Lucia rocks, its hints
of whales. Everything’s more intense!
I feel afraid in this
shattering new light.
Dread drifts like fog around my heart.
Why? The sheer, terrible height?
Eerie glint and glance of mica in the rock,
which catches in the glittering sea below?
The rough, long time ravaged coast
here and yonder, yonder,
yonder
far as you look? Or the unlikely cormorant
never so near or rare, so gaunt.
I see the seaside daisy
die so beautifully
here. It loses its nun-like coif
as the lavender leaves fall off
and tiny yellow rockets burst
about its heart
til only the perfect
spiraled flower skull is left.
Last I touch
(as if with hope) the odd, succulent lettuce
of-the-bluff.
Its gray-white rubber flower
leaves a chalk stuff on my finger
like a soft kind of death.
I feel stark
as this Point Lobos rock
where I sit and wait, older,
while you climb higher
among the hundred-million-year old boulders
in search of the precious nest. I rise
in this beautiful place,
look about me like an anxious kid
or a hopeful god
and give what I have into the sea ahead.