Central California Poetry Journal

Volume 98 Number 1

The Poetry of Central California Page 8102

The Poetry of Virgil Dughi

Virgil Dughi was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley. He has been a soldier, student, day laborer, carpenter, building contractor, and college instructor. Mr. Dughi presently resides in Modesto, California with his wife and two daughters, and teaches high school English in Manteca, California. He writes to make sense of the world.

Retreat to the River:
an hegira to Pigeon Flat on the Middle Fork

Out
and away
from the hot,
high summer
valley towns.

East
up 108
through dry Sonora
past Mewuk,
Long Barn,
and Pinecrest.

Higher
into the cool
Sierra passage.

To sit
by the Stanislaus
and listen
with my soul.

Lilly Creek

Up in Emigrant Wilderness,
spilling wildly over Y-meadow Dam in spring,
trickling out of Bear Lake in fall,
runs a creek named Lilly.
Washing rough granite smooth,
she courses down through the canyon.
Perhaps the cartographer or surveyor
or packer or miner who named her
saw that lovely water flower in his mind's eye
floating in one of her calm summer ponds.
But I want to believe,
he named that creek for his
pure-hearted, high-spirited,
delicately beautiful
own true love.

I know at the end
of a long hot summer hike
when I sit in the cool pine shade
in the east canyon breeze
beside her sweet, clear waters
that bubble and roil
I want to rename her
for my own true love.

Mount Oso
(in the California Coast Range)

West on my commute north:
you're a molehill as mountains go,
but you are my Big Buddha Mountain.
Sitting cross-legged in joyful meditation,
your round grassy tummy pregnant and protruding;
you smile over the fields to the highway:
a green vision of serenity in the springtime of my chaos.

All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright by © by Scott Galloway 1998. 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 © Virgil Dughi 1997.

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