I'll read-- I saw a story about the whales migrating,
this morning, so I'll read my whale poem.
This poem was printed in The New Yorker
and The New Yorker copy editor had a lot
to say about the incorrect whale information in this poem.
[LAUGHTER]
So this has passed the test of the copy editor.
I provided evidence from the Point Reyes Ranger Station
that whales do mate where I was saying that they mated,
even though there are plastic whales swimming around
in this poem, too.
But they accepted it.
They allowed me to mix my media, if I got the whales mating
correctly.
"A Foghorn."
I'm reading this for my father who loves the Pacific.
And whale season will start very soon.
(READING) "On Sundays in mid-winter,
when wild iris put their iridescent blades
through the grasses and yellow lupine wait to flower
from their seven-fingered hands, all the
divorced Californians start out to the Point
with their bottled waters in their fragile foreign cars.
They pass the turn-off for the hopeful murmur of beaches,
and pass the moody grays of cooperative farms,
the cattle with their useful udders
the color of wild geranium.
Then they park, if they can, and descend the long steps
by the lighthouse where the tough crimson algae cling
to the broken stones.
And when they arrive at the rail,
they look past the cormorants, past the Farallones to the space
where the whales should be.
And the split chord of the foghorn calls to them.
The whales are too far to hear it.
The whales, in their secrecy, give off the dull sheen
of Etruscan mirrors.
Down the coast they travel, and the twisted cypresses
gather to look.
They swim by LA, with its nights of shining leather,
toward the temperate waters of Baja where they will mate.
In pictures, they are all smiles--
sweet diligence, or the weak little smile of
exhausted history.
Their corrugated sides undulate as they
play, moving in a time both linear and cyclical.
They all swim here, Melville's whale, and Jonah's--
even the hollow plaster whale of Disney--
for this is California.
Surely the people crave some blankness between sightings,
but someone spots one every few minutes, a heart-breaking flash,
the cry goes out--
each moment a contained unit--
then the cry passes, brief as a human life.
They say this call is heard in all the great systems.
The sleepy ones will gather at the shore
to proclaim the glamour of the alien sun,
while in the nearby desert one real solitary arranges himself
on a pile of fronds.
Come home, says the disembodied voice to all of them.
But here on the Point the wind is fierce.
It blows the people to the right as they
pose for snapshots under the beehive-shaped, art deco
lantern.
And the foghorn calls their two-toned names,
until the names sound interchangeable.
John-ny!
Mar-y!
A major third downward accent on the second syllable.
The call goes out in reverse, away from them,
over the hugely populated universe,
as though it sent their questions out for them.
What shall we be?
What shall we do now, divorced from our lives,
and from this century?
And the land splits behind them, the conglomerate
cliffs letting them go, letting the Point slide toward Alaska.
They wait, as if at the prow of a fatherless ship,
leaning there.
They have waited a long time, they are so used to waiting.
They have waited for the winning number,
or for the changes in someone, or for the nocturne
to rewind itself around the spool--
shouldn't something have pity on them now?
It is late; pelicans and egrets and herons go by,
and the foghorn continues its anthem
of names, only for them of course, only
in this human realm."