A. W. Langston was born in Bakersfield, California and lived in the San Joaquin Valley for 20 years. He attended CSU Fresno as an English Major and was a student of Philip Levine, Peter Everwine and Charles Hanzlicek. He currently resides in Los Osos, CA with his wife and three daughter's. Mr. Langston's poem "Courthouse Park" has been accepted for publication by the International Library of Poetry in an upcoming anthology to be released in March 2000.
A.W. Langston is employed by the County of San Luis Obispo as an Employment Resource Specialist III in the Social Services Department.
The sun lifts itself above dawns pink face,
On the undersides of maple limbs, threaded dew
A land snail and its thin shield of spiral
A horned owl settles and folds it silent wings,
When I speak to the river
In daydreams I fly thru twilight air
As I rise, my prey dangles in the crisp air above the river,
Into the whirring lathe of color and air
That spins the valley haze in warm spirals.
Stick-legged water striders skitter atop the river,
As crickets big as cigars rub their dank wings
Of early morning dew.
Dangles from larvae, which design the faces
That fly and breathe light thru wings.
Hollow reeds whisper to the air
In a dialect known only by the river,
As trout rise for nymphs, then disappear in quiet spirals.
Leaves its glistening, jellied dew
Across a granite slab by the river.
It wields its knobby-eyed face
Antennaed and high, as if feeling the air
For the vibration of beating wings.
Knowing that in twilight there are spirals
That twist a path of violent, rushing air.
The trickle of moist, post-predatory dew
Is all that remains from the warm pulp of a field mouse's face,
As the owl's head tilts, turns, and listens to the winding river.
It tells me it has been visited by wings.
It meanders and shimmers, exposing its face
In reflected skies. Lost feathers spiral
Down upon the restless waters and gather mossy dew
Along the riverbanks, longing to be recaptured by air.
Which hold the voices that belong to the river.
My hollow eyes secrete jeweled dew
As I plunge into a death spiral
And extend beneath soundless wings
The honed claws that impale the pink flesh of a startled face.
While evening dew wafts across my cunning wings,
And moonlit spirals reveal the incandescent glare in my face.
This morning I am walking alone
The compass of my soul
Yesterday's hoof prints
The soles of my shoes
That distills the scent
I can hear the din of hoofs and nostrils
Leaves them sweating and spewing
I step off the trail
Resonates each quaking step,
I'm flat on my back
With their hot breath and slathering tongues,
Rattles from their percussive,
By purpose, by instinct.
Creeping slowly into daybreak.
And takes me to the river
Watching them is a lesson
Them replenish the effort
Quenches the thirst.
Of the thirsty.
A long, full drink.
Reflects on the merit
Down a dirt path
And I am knowingly lost.
Has led me here,
And I follow
Of steers and horses
Who went down to the river.
Press mane hair and straw
Into this trail of earth,
Of moist soil and excrement.
Behind me, perhaps twenty yards or so,
Against the gathering daybreak.
Their ritual passage of trod and heave
Their might and spittle in guttural
Refrains of instinctual purpose.
And lie in wait for them.
As they get closer, the ground
And their urgent pants
Begin to quicken my heart.
Staring at the pale, new sky.
They go by filling the crisp air
That rise to the level of flies.
My spine, horizontal to the cool, hard earth
Lumbering strain towards the river.
I am lost by choice,
I am found by my thoughts,
Like silent moccasins
This is when my soul
Becomes a compass,
Where the cattle and horses
Take their long, morning drink.
In the progress of the soul.
As they drink, one can see
Of their journey.
This is the way a soul
The river is alive and
Thriving with the souls
I lean down, dip my face
In the water and take
The beast in my soul
Alone and thirsty,
Of the chosen journey,
In order to ascend.
At sunset the marine layer sprawls
The scent of salt rises off wet,
Breathing the alchemy of salt and cypress
I succumb to a sovereign origin
My thoughts rise bodiless,
A few miles off the coast,
Leaking lemon-rust shades
That burst and bleed across the horizon.
Windswept sand and clings to
Cypress trees above the shoreline.
Calms the fierce-blue tumor,
Which pulls and twists the marrow in me
Like a propeller underwater.
As the sun seemingly does,
Leaving iridescent blues to deepen twilight..
Believing that the elements and I
Share a secret way of healing.
At sunrise the scent of decaying redwood
My senses like sextants measure beyond
I hear the resonance of sail-cloth and wood
The ghosts of mill men whose flesh and limbs
Thick spars of deadfall intersect at profuse angles.
Reshaping shadow and light, the dark and the bright
Distills in vapors that rise off the forest floor.
Diluted sunlight spirals down through branches
Of pine needle sails laden with wooded cones.
Mariner shadings of green and rust.
I walk the columned girth of a sequoian vessel
Run aground and estimate the circumference of the earth.
Scrape, creak, moan, and sigh in the wind,
As fir cones loosen, falling to the ground
In dull thuds from their lofty cradles.
Oozed and twitched across sawdust floors,
Station themselves atop shipmast lookouts
Solemn and hook-handed searching the horizon.
They splinter and rot into a deep abyss of roots,
Bone-wood and fir needles. The morning sun
Slowly idles towards afternoon...and sinks into evening.
Both reveal and conceal the depth of nature.
Blending greens and rust in alchemic passage,
I have seen ships in the forest.
In late twilight
Antares -- a red star,
If my heart is the center of my soul suspended,
Leaving behind my body wake of water.
Deep below my buoyant body, lie glowing fossilized imprints
Neutron stars continue to shimmer
A soul believes in the shimmer of its silent imprint.
A sibling full moon shimmers
Off the lake like a resonant, white gong suspended.
It casts an intangible imprint
On dark, evening water
That rivals its twin soul up among the stars.
Slowly distills in hermetic twilight
As eons prepare its vapored water
For eventual white dwarfness that shimmers
And contracts into a greying imprint,
Forever losing the rare light it once silently suspended.
Then my dreams contain a handful of stars
That reveal their first imprints
During the brief twilight
Of falling asleep. In my dreams I shimmer
And dive into cool, dark water,
I descend, pause, and then rise to the surface breathing suspended
Slantings of light, shadow and air. The sky pulses and shimmers
Too much of the pitted-skull moon and stars
To distinguish pre-dive twilight,
From evenings indelible imprint.
Of the dead fall over loam and water.
Bodiless shells harden in the revenant caves of twilight.
They retain the organic residue of minerals suspended
Inside bloodlines, compacting tiny stars
Of calcite, silica, and pyrite into a skeletal shimmer.
Long after their pious dim imprints
Fade among the giant red stars.
The slow burn of infinite cores suspended
As constellations, navigate cultures across dark water
To discover what is beyond twilight.
With the personality of stars, we dare the current beneath deep water
In order to shine beyond suspended twilight.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 1999. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their
original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © A.W. Langston 2000 .
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