Monterey
When I was twenty, I ran away
with a handsome young artist to Monterey.
We were in love à la folie,
or so we thought. He painted me endlessly,
dressed in gowns, with cascading hair.
I’d only three months left to go
on my college degree. We traveled by bus
to a squat he found on Cannery Row--
abandoned shack with an oil-drum stove.
Cracked windows couldn’t keep out the cold.
The toilet was missing its seat.
He pilfered one from the empty,
echoing factory.
We had little to eat: cups of tea
laced with sugar and lemon,
loaves of crusty bread I bought while,
unbeknownst to me, he slipped rounds of cheese
under his coat.
He dressed like a Cossack in clothes he made
on a treadle sewing machine.
He fancied he looked like the murdered Tsar Nicholas II.
I had to fight for time enough to floss my teeth
in front of the fragment of mirror we nailed to the wall.
The suck and surge of the tide was ever present,
under the floor. The salty air was redolent
of turpentine and linseed oil.
I had never been looked at so closely before
or at such length. I posed and froze with little thought
for the husband I’d left behind,
in hot pursuit of the writer’s life
I hoped would be mine.
Barbara Quick is an award-winning novelist and poet, and a graduate of UC Santa Cruz, based in Sonoma County.
When I was twenty, I ran away
with a handsome young artist to Monterey.
We were in love à la folie,
or so we thought. He painted me endlessly,
dressed in gowns, with cascading hair.
I’d only three months left to go
on my college degree. We traveled by bus
to a squat he found on Cannery Row--
abandoned shack with an oil-drum stove.
Cracked windows couldn’t keep out the cold.
The toilet was missing its seat.
He pilfered one from the empty,
echoing factory.
We had little to eat: cups of tea
laced with sugar and lemon,
loaves of crusty bread I bought while,
unbeknownst to me, he slipped rounds of cheese
under his coat.
He dressed like a Cossack in clothes he made
on a treadle sewing machine.
He fancied he looked like the murdered Tsar Nicholas II.
I had to fight for time enough to floss my teeth
in front of the fragment of mirror we nailed to the wall.
The suck and surge of the tide was ever present,
under the floor. The salty air was redolent
of turpentine and linseed oil.
I had never been looked at so closely before
or at such length. I posed and froze with little thought
for the husband I’d left behind,
in hot pursuit of the writer’s life
I hoped would be mine.
Barbara Quick is an award-winning novelist and poet, and a graduate of UC Santa Cruz, based in Sonoma County.
