4.3 – Driving Through Big Sur

June 25, 2009

Beetling white knuckled along the coast road
below the obdurate glass of the obscene houses,
water pumped high to their tarping pools,
above the surfers that dot the water
rising and crashing with the waves.
Something in me is also crashing and falling.
I’m driving watching from the corner of my eye:
a drunken hawk descending through a thermal,
a boat driving deep into the kelp beds,
the scars of the switchbacks stretching
into the mist of the obscured horizon.
We don’t know we’re going no particular place
until I see the sign shaking in the rear-view,
’Big Sur 15 miles’. We’ve been there and through
without a thought and I say nothing
because my hunger is happy
to be close to the heat of you,
because between glances at the clouds
sealing the boundary of the darkening
sky and the impossibly colored water,
because between glimpses of
the terrifying cliffs worn down by
their endless war with the waves,
I can steal looks at the tongue-smoothed
hollow at the base of your neck,
a thumbsweep’s perfect line from your lips
if I could hold your face in both hands
in the fading light
at the far end of
the other way.

[pad 4.3 - 6/25/09]

Tags: pad, poetry, Writing