Her Island of the Western Sea

a poem...

Her Island of the Western Sea

Shark Fin
Dolphin Fin
Pilot Whale Fin
Bonita leaping
From afar distant in the Sea
To my eyes
Blue reflecting grey
Calm slow swells
Pass under slick areas unrippled by the breeze
Of the morning passage
Under the marine layering of cloud cover
Catalina Island
Destined passengers
Sometimes get seasick
Embarrassed
Children laughing, chasing about
Forgotten in my woosiness
Taints my awareness
Told to be still as the horizon line
Hold steady thoughtless
The largeness of the great Ocean
Wonder
A solemnness in everyone's eyes
Fleeting from time to time
Among candy bars and coca cola and talk of other places
Past and Future
Are no homes for travelers
Glimpse the present
Past encrusted
Barnacled pier pilings
In clusters of three bound by entwining ropes
Hand held familiarairily over and around moorings
Snugged by a windlass
Clanked each notch
Secured
The Ship aside the Pier
Gaily covered by a red uniformed band playing
People gathered celebrating
The arrival of the King of the Sea Depths
Produce Neptune's mermaids
Lead the parade through Town
I follow
Continually amused by everyone and everything
Meet in the curio and souvenir shops
Sell time and place
Commemorate
The casino now a dance floor and movies and museum
In which I found the death's head of a prescient dream
Charred black skull of an Indian cremated
Bones in a stone bowl
Under a glass case cover
Jewelry Indian artifacts
Beads and mother of pearl fish hooks
Unused a long time
For fish
Fished
The same now as four thousand years ago
Gabrielinos owned undeededly the island
Hasn't changed much
As a place the present then remains present now
Understood the fascination with changeless time
Humanely embellished
Over
The years
Change
Is our creation
Began in the Ocean began
Clearing the other side of the boat's bottom glass
Permits visibility to nearly eighty feet
Down I look
With my chin on my hands
Have fed too with a broken urchin
Spines don't trouble
Garibaldis
Probably don't know they are our sacred fish
Swim beneath the sea glass
Clear
In the distant deep blue
Silver and blue fish flashings
Over bottomless depths
I strain to see
Presently
I awake from a disappointedly dreamless nap
On my back in the pale blue hotel room
Scents and landscape paintings on the walls
Remind me of other travels
Make awareness hear more things
Outside
Birds calling distantly
The unintelligible voices of people talking
Muffled through the wall
Unlike through the window
The intoning of the low bell gongs melodiously marking the hour
Arrived
An evening time
Sun through broken silver clouds
Above the house decorated hills
Inland
Is forbidden
Changing the hills there
Would be a sacrilege
The Indians would understand
Even after all their trouble with us
As we have yet to understand fully
The holiness of the present
A present, gift, presented
From one generation to the next generation
Unchanged
Alive and living
Still the buffalo
To be seen
Future plans
Made in ticket booths
Become real at appointed hours
Arrived
I take my seat
Beside the black tinted windows
Scenery passes
Through the eucalyptus planted
One by one aside the road
Climbed upwards at first
I was forewarned of things to be
Seen
The buffalos, ground squirrels, wild boars, goats, ravens black
A rare color for the Arabian horses
Bred to a dun desert
Prickly pear cactus
Yellow flowers blooming
The time of the season
Warm
I only wore my jacket in the shaded places
Along the road once for wagons
Widened the Indian's path
About the Island
Mountains, hills really,
But here beside the Sea they seem high
The view
Like from an airplane
Landing field on a cutoff mountain top
Leveled
For arrivals and departures
A shaded glen wagoner's rest called Eagle's Nest
Under the one hundred year old oak
Shades the table where I have a donut and coffee
Shared by others
The warning of poison oak
I am comically familiar with
The left over donuts
Fed the goats, the pigs, the cows, the horses, the ravens,
All the animals
Like the fish
Hurried
Lured for our eyes
Smiled always in their corners
Brought our ride to precarious edges
Of seeing
The rock cliff carved by the Sea like an Indian's head
A frog in a boulder sitting
In the middle of the road the largest old buffalo
Bull with his harem
Cows with calves
Frightened by our passage
Ended down the road to Avalon
Town streets that end in the blue sky
Framed a white board hotel
Window frames painted blue
Like San Francisco's
Memory
Places in most prominence
The sight of an Indian camp on a west facing shore
Looked out all the way to China
Somehow found its way to an Indian's thoughts
While
A large bivalve shell was made into an ochre treasure case
Filled with asphaltum
Preserved the broken in half figurine of Buddha
Buried in a grave before Cabrillo
Discovered
And remembered in the museum
Tells the end of the Indians
Taken by the Franciscans to the mainland
Protected them from marauding hunters
Killed otters and Indians
Gone now
Just a seashell midden in the road cut
Through basalt
Twenty million years old.

DolphinWords


Poem is like from early 1980's...maybe I can find date...bought a souvenir  Catalina poster, since lost...brb...no luck...there's a little yearly festival in the Spring, and the poster was about that...picture of Mermaid overlooking the Casino in the back ground...I'll have to look about now and then to see if I can find a replacement copy for my lost one...I was fond of it!...I have been on Catalina just  that once...and a few times off shore scuba diving back then...I must have turned poem in as class work, as my old copy is marked up...with long poems of this sort by me I can put people asleep!...it has shifting word play...the little Buddha figurine I've since learned may have come from a visit, or wreck, of a Spanish ship on return from the Philippines...before Cabrillo...

DavidDavid