Gerard Van der Leun is the Senior Editor of Penthouse Magazine and currently lives in New York City. A native Californian, Van der Leun was raised in Paradise, California, Sacramento, and San Jose. He attended the University of California at Davis as well as at Berkeley where he studied poetry with Thom Gunn. About Central California and his poetry Mr. Van der Leun writes:
"As a native Californian, I was blessed with what I now recognize as an idyllic childhood in Paradise and the Santa Cruz mountains. My earliest memories are involved with the landscape of California, from the pine covered canyons with their lava flows and remnants of the Gold Rush days. The colors and textures of the Sierras and the Great Central Valley are touchstones for me even though I have not lived there for many years. Added onto this palette I would have to include the rich sense impressions gleaned from years of walking and driving along the coast north of San Francisco. Our first impressions are often those that linger the longest and I have endeavored to use them whenever appropriate in my work. Although much of my current work is done in formal structures, I still find that when I work in loose forms that the meter and rhetorical shape of the lines in some way replicate the pace one walks at along the shore or over the hills and down the canyons of that landscape; a kind of hiking beat.
"Even now, when I return to visit family in the area, some of my favorite moments are found out beyond wherever the current urban sprawl stops and the California landscape rolls on. It surprises me that, even today, most of the earliest colors and shapes and smells and sights remain unperturbed and to the side of time."
1.
The empty rituals and dusty opulence
Later, I drive the Skyway to the town named Paradise,
The place we have come to is where the pines lean out
2.
The stream, its waters revolving round
Are these reflections but the world without,
Or are such frail forms shaped upon this water all
Perhaps this life is all that is and, once lost,
Or perhaps we are the center of all circles,
of the nightmare's obvious ending dwindle,
and the sounds of departing automobiles
fade into the humm beyond the cul-de-sac.
Inside the house my mother sits quietly,
surrounded by the plates of finger food
that everybody brought and no one ate,
and wonders if she should begin to take
clothes from the closet, call the Goodwill.
Some blocks away, the Methodist minister hangs
his vestments on a peg, and goes to lunch.
park the car at the canyon's rim, and sit awhile
in the hot silence of the afternoon looking out
at the far mountains where, in June, the winter lingers.
On the seat beside me, a well-taped cardboard cube
contains what remains of my father. I climb out
and, taking the cube under my arm, begin to climb
down the canyon's lava wall to the stream below.
The going is slow, but we get to the bottom by and by
and sitting on some moss, we rest awhile, the cube and I,
beside the snow-chilled stream.
from the boulders at the edge of the stream,
the place where what the stream carries builds up in the backwater,
making in the mounds of matter an inventory of the year:
rusted tins slumped under the fallen sighs of weeds,
diminishing echoes of the blackbird's gliding wings,
laughs buoyed in the hollow belly of stunted trees,
gears, tires, the bones of birds, brilliant pebbles,
the rasping windwish of leaf fall crushed to dust,
the thunk of bone on bark, of earth on wood, the silence
of ash on water. And in such silence, he fades forever.
through river, ocean, clouds, and rain,
bears away the hands and eyes,
but still the memory remains,
answering in pantomime the questions never asked:
carried on but never borne, onward, westward,
towards sunlight glazed on sea's thigh?
the things that are, and we, immersed above in air,
the forms that fade, mere mirrors of the stream?
the end of all that was, with nothing
left to be, with no pine wind to taste,
nor sun to dapple mind with dream.
Perhaps it is all ash dissolving,
our lives but rain in circles falling.
our fall the final fall of night because we are
that single soul, that heart of stars,
that place where sun and water meet,
that golden hand whose placid palm,
once we have shimmered into sunlight,
remains forever open in the coldest light of day.
Three ravens, black blades slicing the sky
Tousled kelp tangles --hair of warm women--
Red weed in rotting drifts,
Above him, the black shadows punch out the blue sky,
Arced reefs of pebbles,
He came then to the place where the stone shouldered out of sea,
Green slate waters stretched up the shingle.
skimmed over the rim of the cliff,
pacing the walker below as if,
at some misstep, he might make a meal,
while around him tracks of animals
perforated the sand strewn above the pools.
tug at his ankles. Drifts of oval pale-gray stone --
cast-off eyes of ancient mornings -- swarm underfoot.
For adornment, the beach boasts necklaces of foam
encrusted with shards of redwood, sea-drilled stones,
mounds of headdresses heaped up from cormorant bones,
capes fashioned from a silver mosaic of wings.
pink-tinged fleshy stalks
redolent with sea-tang and gold,
spun from the sun underwater,
brindle sheaves of sulfured rocks
sweating beneath the cliffs.
hovering and chittering behind a screen of eucalyptus,
while, to the whisper of cottonwoods, an ancient woman
drowses on the sand, sedated by the pulsing rattle
of sea's throat wave-sifted with stones and with sleep,
stirred deep in the sand of scraped bones.
sleek and salty on the tongue.
Pools of sluggish gelatin,
heaving in the cold sea sweat.
Lagoons within lagoons languishing
where the tide never ebbs.
where the bent trees stood bleached and stripped bare by the wind,
where the orange-beaked gulls hunched in clusters like gray grapes,
and the snow-tailed sea lion swam stated in the swell,
his head receding like an island in the troughs.
Sandpipers skimmed chanting across the wave tops.
Rafts of uprooted weed soothed the sea into sluggish ponds,
and sent shorewards the slurping lap of capped foam,
to the place where the time that rusts clocks was stripped bare,
and smashed down onto slate, while the ravens screeched,
and the blue hands were dragged deep by the satisfied crabs.
On the trail towards the summit
Snow ghosts swirl behind drifts
Following the stream up the ravine
It's all been settled long ago.
At the crest, looking back, looking below,
Clouds invade the mountains --
hands through water, tears in rain,
smoke in dreams. The steps accumulate,
first one foot, then the other,
pacing out the end of the old year.
of leaf-shimmer, veils of wind
whose whispers echo far back
in the brain, singing to the
tempo of the breath: "Once only,
once only, once only, only once."
guarded by sentinels of stone, of fir,
of trees so tall their tops vanish
into the breath of the mountains.
Ebony glimmer of raven's wings
banking into green on darker green.
Only on foot, step by step,
can you climb up, beyond, and
out of time -- except for the weight
you carry forever on your back;
thread spinning back to the Labyrinth.
herds of mule deer graze beneath the pylons.
A survey crew measures a river of steel,
Planning to attach it with copper cables
to the Matrix far beyond the mountains.
Above, the mountains' shoulders shatter the rain.
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 1997. 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 © Gerard Van der Leun 1997.
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10-19-97