specific beautiful things
Monterey Bay, 2014
sun glare hair face bones lips tongue
beak body frenzy of
a giant flotilla in the knot
of bait an armada in the shoals
of open mouths so outrageous
up-close feast surfeit orgy
some floating most diving
or circling in maybe they’ve come
a long way approaching
steadily like the brown
strong-shouldered pelican’s
course along the harbor mouth
his turn and glide his zeroing-
in his sudden fall
Tidepool, Point Lobos
First covered by the great messed up
bedclothes of onrushing sea
white, turquoise-tinged,
then foamed and feathered
like ripples of stone or ice--
eroded cliffs the size of a forehead
and hermit crabs—lateral, tactical,
skittering around in a garden of anemones…
each limpet and barnacle,
like each freckle or mole,
each mineral compassion
or starfish… meanwhile,
your booted footfalls,
your smiling eyes.
It is spring in the great canyons
near here where someone has found
surprising sea fossils,
even sea-cow bones
in the mountains last week,
rugged, unpolished, unearthed…
glaciers, oceans… wind’s… divine
erosion, exposing
water, flesh and stone.
The Shore
Salt of one against the wound of the other--
always a body filtering through this body.
Yet the shore does not appear
to be in pain—how is it not
writhing at the sheer immensity
of touch? where the wave whispers,
unfolds its skin, where receding water
seeps to froth, sucks down, winnows atoms,
sighs, breathes a dog-eared song.
Ken Weisner lives in Santa Cruz and teaches writing at De Anza College in Cupertino where he edits Red Wheelbarrow. For fifteen years, Ken edited Quarry West out of Porter College, UCSC. His most recent collection of poems is Anything on Earth (2010, Hummingbird Press). His work has been featured on Sam Hamill’s “Poets Against the War” website, in The Music Lovers Poetry Anthology (Persea, 2007), and on The Writer’s Almanac (2010), as well as in Wilma Chandler’s “Willing Suspension Armchair Theater” productions of Lost and Found: The Literature of Fathers and Sons--and in recent editions of the Chicago Quarterly Review, Porter Gulch Review, DMQ Review, Phren-Z and the forthcoming Perfume River Poetry Review.
Monterey Bay, 2014
sun glare hair face bones lips tongue
beak body frenzy of
a giant flotilla in the knot
of bait an armada in the shoals
of open mouths so outrageous
up-close feast surfeit orgy
some floating most diving
or circling in maybe they’ve come
a long way approaching
steadily like the brown
strong-shouldered pelican’s
course along the harbor mouth
his turn and glide his zeroing-
in his sudden fall
Tidepool, Point Lobos
First covered by the great messed up
bedclothes of onrushing sea
white, turquoise-tinged,
then foamed and feathered
like ripples of stone or ice--
eroded cliffs the size of a forehead
and hermit crabs—lateral, tactical,
skittering around in a garden of anemones…
each limpet and barnacle,
like each freckle or mole,
each mineral compassion
or starfish… meanwhile,
your booted footfalls,
your smiling eyes.
It is spring in the great canyons
near here where someone has found
surprising sea fossils,
even sea-cow bones
in the mountains last week,
rugged, unpolished, unearthed…
glaciers, oceans… wind’s… divine
erosion, exposing
water, flesh and stone.
The Shore
Salt of one against the wound of the other--
always a body filtering through this body.
Yet the shore does not appear
to be in pain—how is it not
writhing at the sheer immensity
of touch? where the wave whispers,
unfolds its skin, where receding water
seeps to froth, sucks down, winnows atoms,
sighs, breathes a dog-eared song.
Ken Weisner lives in Santa Cruz and teaches writing at De Anza College in Cupertino where he edits Red Wheelbarrow. For fifteen years, Ken edited Quarry West out of Porter College, UCSC. His most recent collection of poems is Anything on Earth (2010, Hummingbird Press). His work has been featured on Sam Hamill’s “Poets Against the War” website, in The Music Lovers Poetry Anthology (Persea, 2007), and on The Writer’s Almanac (2010), as well as in Wilma Chandler’s “Willing Suspension Armchair Theater” productions of Lost and Found: The Literature of Fathers and Sons--and in recent editions of the Chicago Quarterly Review, Porter Gulch Review, DMQ Review, Phren-Z and the forthcoming Perfume River Poetry Review.