The End of the Road Restaurant

My father once told me he felt like a six-piston engine
firing on only two. After L.A.’s poverty,
father dead, mother on welfare, he wanted to believe
his evangelical upbringing, but drifted
through a young dalliance with the preacher’s mad wife,
into the Navy, Korea, back to the bosom
of the Nazarene Church, finally marrying,
bringing his first child into the world.
What was a man to do, then, but raise a family,
go to seminary, become a minister himself
till they kicked him out for speaking in tongues
in the wrong denomination. Desperately,
then, become a junior high school teacher
in the most desolate town on Highway 99
till he couldn’t stand it, left
with his family, took us all to live
in a geodesic dome in the Sierras,
study metaphysics, torture a Japanese garden
from the hillside’s dusty clay. There was
little money, my mother still teaching,
his retirement sunk into dreams of building.
So his friend Jack let him cook
at the End of the Road miles from anywhere
frequented by faithful dreamers
and intrepid tourists. My sister
sang jazz, my mother waited tables,
and I, back from college
watched my father sweat at the stove
cooking steak, barbeque chicken,
finding stubborn joy late in life
over grilled onions, rinds of pepper--
the end of one road, another opening
in his eyes like sky.


 Dane Cervine’s latest book is entitled How Therapists Dance, from Plain View Press (2013), which also published his previous book The Jeweled Net of Indra.  His poems have been chosen by Adrienne Rich for a National Writers Union Award; by Tony Hoagland as a finalist for the Wabash Poetry Prize; a Second Place prize for the Caesura Poetry contest; twice a finalist for, and the 2013 winner of the Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Prize; 2nd Prize in the 2013 Morton Marcus Poetry Award; and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. Dane’s work has appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Hudson Review, The SUN Magazine, Sycamore Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Red Wheelbarrow, numerous anthologies, newspapers, video & animation. Visit his website at: www.DaneCervine.typepad.com  Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Forethought of Grief

One day in October
I decide to visit the four 
side by side graves
on the green knoll
overlooking Monterey Bay.

I don’t come often,
don’t really think of them
there among the rows
of bronze plaques,
vases of plastic flowers.

They arrived one by one,
none recent, the last
nearly fifty years ago,
nevertheless unforgettable
in the smallest of details.

It seems the memories
are always the same,
his cigarette burning down
in the glass ash tray
on the stand by his red chair,
afternoons at the hairdresser
to arrange her silver white curls,
his series of classic matchbox cars,
and her chubby hand flinging
spoons from her highchair.

For a time I stand in silence,
wait to hear the breathy hush
of waves along the bay shore.
Still my old bitterness returns,
the deep throb of revisiting
so much loss in one place.

Blue Heron

At Sweetwater Springs
the stiff-legged heron
struts slowly,
each knee joint rises
and lowers
in measured cadence.
Slender salt grass parts
to accept placement
of her toes
among phytoplankton
and red pickleweed
in the estuary.

She walks under a ceiling
of coastal mists,
dips her beak
into the marsh algae
to grasp invertebrates,
a measure of sustenance --

just as this shoreline forest,
this vernal pond
are my nourishment

when I come forward
gradually, deliberately
to the edge of the sea.

Seacoast Passage

 Just beyond Carmel,
Highway One stretches
out past Point Lobos,
winds through the highlands,
bypasses Spindrift Road
and Yankee Point.

Infinite shades of blue
extend to a distant horizon.
Along this hem of California
wavelets wash ashore
beneath shattered cliffs.
Small islands of stone
pepper cerulean coves.

 A luminous membrane
lacquers the unruffled sea.
Vertigo-inducing bluffs
descend to curving
itinerant coastal ribbon.

We leave home by noon,
marvel more than once
at our good fortune,
clear shoreline sky,
a taste of briny moisture,
and pampas grass flags
that summon us south.

In addition to writing poetry, Laura Bayless explores creativity through collage, photography, and absurdity.  Formerly shy, she now delights in requests to read her poems to strangers.