Jeffers at Tor House

I felt the patience of things

In the crush of sand

Beneath my feet

Even the rush of surf

In which the foam of time swirled

Around my ankles

Lent me some patience.

And the cliffs above and their outcrops

Pummeled by the waves, too

Lent me some patience

As I watched the tide

Tear the cliffs invisibly down

And was hypnotized by nature’s display of power.

It was here in Monterrey bay

Near your home at Carmel Point

That I sought at times to come to peace with the world

As I imagined you ghostly roaming this land somewhere nearby me.

And I felt like you, Jeffers, as I pondered this world

That material and political conquest

Had gone too far

And that history was intractable in its rage of human corruption

And from where I stood along the ocean

I feared its clawing menace would overtake me

With all its powerful currents of  lies and violence

As I felt the magnitude of human evil and human ignorance

As an ocean in themselves

But I saw my steps as a new chance

To any but me, their only seer.

And I wrote poems along the ocean, most of which were lost.

Some were just written in the sand.

I was very young then.

Let those poems, those which remain,
Endure with the agony of a young fool

Who was learning of patience with his suffering,

Who stood in your shadow and the shadow of ages past
Along the ocean

And trembled at the thought of all the death and corruption

When the world was too much with him

And read your poetry
Because you were the archetypal California poet,

A man of the sea and the Carmel mountains, the Los Padres.

As you stood in those poems before the sea

You didn’t bring us the honey of peace of old poems, Jeffers,

But the memory of the sword

And all in all, your words bespoke a mania
With the world of war and violence

And an abhorrence of shallow man’s encroachment upon nature.

You were a misanthrope,

A misanthrope with pacifist and proto-environmentalist leanings.

You felt the answer

Was not to be deluded by any ideas of the progress of civilization.

There was something of Aurelius in you,

Something of Diogenes in you too, very cynical…

Yet from New York they called you a prophet

And with that you picked up a golden harp and plucked
One misanthropic note over and over again,
To much profit during your heyday.

With every snap of the waves you told us it was Man

Who was the monster, a being who tainted everything he touched.

When you brought us to the sea it seemed to only brood

On man’s poor judgement and his shortcomings.

You contaminated that beauty with the endless crash

Of sad human memory and of what it means to be an animal

Whose teeth are fitted tightly into the jaws of history.

No, I never quite understood your repeated loathing

Of civilization which you pounded like the stonecutter you were,

Nevertheless your stance on things left

An indelible impression on me.

As I left my impress upon the wet sand

And claimed the despair I brought there,

Being patient as a man with the ways of man.

I could not bear to taint this silent place beside the ocean

With my ill-feelings of what it meant to be human

By dreams l stood, longing for a better world.

And I knew it would never be found

Through your pessimism.

Yet, you saw your vitriol, I think, as some spite

Of empire, but you couldn’t untangle any hope

From the wrack the ages cast upon your shores