California Dreaming

Palm 40 x 50 cm

WHY I’M NOT A REGIONAL POET

There are at least three climate zones here. As the fog

   cools espresso

scented mornings in Tiburon, in eucalyptus-rich Berkeley,

everything grayish and sweet, a few miles away in Contra Costa

County a freshly washed pair of jeans dries in just thirty minutes

   of unhindered sunshine. About thirty-miles more inland,

in even hotter Livermore Valley, where physicians and shrinks maintain

   tax shelter “farms,”

the zinfandel grape—known as “Primitivo”

   in the Abruzzi and Puglia—flourishes, while the slower

   growth of pinot noir and chardonnay

is managed in cooler, foggier Napa-Sonoma. In winter

chains of bright green hills look like Ireland and Wales though by July

   as bleached and dry platinum and incendiary

as any plain in Cervantes. We swim in pools of chlorinated water

   usually a neighbor’s because only neighbors have swimming pools

the ocean too cold up here in the North for sustained immersion.

In what we call winter—okay, stop laughing—we soak in redwood hot tubs

   talking about what ever

passes through our badly singed synapses. Many of us, even the natives—

   a fatigued sunburned lot who meet

   once a year in Oxnard for chipped beef on toast—

have trouble remembering the state flower, bird, motto, lapses that

   may have more to do with chronic herbal abuse than indifference.

Maybe I’m a regional poet after all, though I detest the genre: aren’t we so great,

   it seems to say, aren’t we so lovely posing in our provincial pig sties,

that warm stupid feeling a child has just after wetting the bed.

Still, it’s not easy getting entirely away from where it all began, poet

   of a dream state. A state of dreams

that really does believe it resides in paradise but only sometimes:

   when there isn’t a serial killer

making the rounds, adding body parts to his collection, when

the earth is steady as she goes, no hillside stranger in my lap,

   no half a school on my roof,

when the governor doesn’t wear cowboy boots at a press conference….

I would prefer not to say anything more about it.

   It might run away then, this state of mind,

to a space where the sun is less ambitious, where regional identity

 is not an issue of wine & cheese,

the nebulous Zen message or the nose job

but of God, guns, abstinence and unwanted pregnancies.

 The Mamas and the Papas - California Dreamin'