Sight

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2011

July 4th’s vigilant gaze above leftcoast cliffshores
Probe passions inside from landside an outside
Buddyless lone surfer surveys cold western swell
Where seafoam tidelines mark California edgerock

Green Pacific waters dissolve to grey Pacific mist
Fogs waft north to hide Marin and Point Reyes
Boredom of onshore hours in flat sessions
Send Buddyless and board wheeling homeward

Can the dragon guard of an approaching stormfront
Hear whispers of struggle between angry friends
C'est une question morale ancient exemplars adjure
Green eyes seek new horizons beyond the Farallones

Conquistadors and Conquerers

Ochre pumice cliffs,
Mexico's humid Pacific rim.
An ocean wave
Grinds floating stones,
Coloured glass,
Sparkling detritus
On the salty metate,
Deserting, abandoning
Memories of centuries.

Dense green flesh
Jungle sweat
Open wound blossoms,
Vermillion and teal and Sun
Yellow and midnight purple
Each coloured bloom an
Annunciation trumpet fanfare,
Time passing; Every
Flower's perfume an
Epitaph on the wind.

Unaware, all the sun-drunk
Lovers lay curled,
Entwined limbs and
Love-stained lips
Whispering eternal
Secrets outward into
The mouth of the sea.

An army of blue-uniformed
Stormclouds advancing
In tight formation
Over the steel Pacific
Gather booty,
Strange and wondrous,
Ideas, feelings, every hue,
Every texture.

The militant skies
Open a deluge
Pour it raging
Into the heart
Of Mexico.
Her soil of souls
Wells up
Blood and tears
In Artesian spirits,
Kahlo, Orozco, Fuentes, Rivera.

Fountains to
Capture divine ichor.
In the walls of the
Casa Azul and reflected
In the Buried Mirror
Oil, ink, cardboard, canvas,
Silence, volcanically majestic.

These relics, this flotsam
Broken loose from ancient
Moorings, washed screaming
Downstream, mingling in
Borderlands of el Norte.

Powerful Northwind eddies
Blown by neighbors and friends
Rockefeller, Getty
Catch tight hold
On strange warm jetsam
Lodging it, welding it
Into Manhattan steel and
Searching for Cibolá,
La Raza is in a wilderness,
Lost in California's Dream.

Pacific Postings

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

A couple of days before Memorial Day, an appointment with a dentist for a second opinion and I want a trip to the beach. I need a trip to the beach. So my friend and I pack up our camera stuff and jump in his car and head for Point Reyes National Seashore.

My agitation from the dental appointment is so great I forget to bring sunblock. When we finally arrive at Point Reyes I realize this and my friend pulls out something that looks like a roll-on deodorant which I laugh at and turn down but my friend insists that it is not deodorant, it's a hiking lubricant with sunblock in it.

A hiking lubricant. Something you apply where something might chafe. With sunblock. If clothing is chafing somewhere, that means it's rubbing on your body and irritating it. If clothing is irritating your body wouldn't it be covering the part of the bady that's being chafed? If it's covered why does it need sunblock? Doesn't matter, the sunblock worked even though it smelled kind of funny.

As we drove through the Olema Valley, which sits atop the San Andreas Fault, I couldn't help but notice the beauty of this place. The Point Reyes National Seashore to the west with its conifers, California bay-laurel trees, oaks and wildflowers rather promiscuously showing themselves to the bees and tourists like myself, always gives me a sense of anticipation. That sense is exceptional in the spring when sunlight has a crisp quality which has attracted painters for a couple of centuries.

We took Limantour Beach road over the ridge-top of Point Reyes and parked in one of those lots that have been created a few hundred yards from the ocean. We had to wait for a woman with four children, unloading her van with beach paraphernalia to close her door so we could park. While she was unloading and we were getting our camera stuff together her children took off at high speed for the water in a comic follow-the-leader kind of full-tilt run. It was nice to see them filled with the same sort of anticipation I felt.

I offered to help their mother carry her beach things which she refused but I felt better for the attempt. After this semi-charitable effort we walked out to the beach and began to take photos. I had taken a few when I finally figured out the timing on the digital camera I was using. It is an older Olympus with an amazing zoom but its speed of response needs a different kind of understanding than my film cameras.

It was one of those moments when everything comes together. I was looking through the viewfinder at breaking waves and thinking "if only I could catch one of those at the right moment", and then I pressed the camera trigger half way to focus the zoom lens which worked the way it was supposed to, then watched as the wave started to break and in a moment of emotional overload pressed the trigger all the way and heard the digital shutter beep and voilá I had a picture of a breaking wave. My first successful shot of something moving.

The big success here was not the wave; the big success was the understanding I got for the timing of the camera. I have been trying to capture action shots with no success. I almost had an inner glow; my anticipation completely paid off with an "ah-hah, so that's the way it works!"

Maybe timing is everything.