In Shoreline Park
Despite every good intention, I’m nodding off alongside
zinnias and birds of paradise as we face into the blue . . .
perhaps there’s something up there to take my mind off
all that’s left to do, and the time I don’t have to do it?
Fairweather clouds shine as bright as mirrors . . .
but they don’t reflect much beyond the grab bag
of our fates, about which I’ve registered complaints
and 2nd guesses all the way to this bench where no one
in a sharkskin suit with Brylcreemed hair is about to
pop out from behind a hedge with a microphone and
shout, “This is Your Life!”, signaling the control room
to fire-up the highlight reels and bring back the lost . . .
my buddies and me on long boards, walking the nose,
pearling into the soup . . . hanging out the windows
of a rebuilt ’56 Bel Air . . . walking home from school
in broken shoes, content with nothing more than
the remainder of an unburdened afternoon. Now,
I can just hear the tide echoing below the cliff,
rushing in my blood . . . wondering how I managed
to turn up here, losses outweighing every affidavit
of joy—byproduct of stardust, a legacy from whom
or who knows where? But there’s always someone
who will declare “best day of my life” as if lives
were something we came by as easily as flowers?
I raise my hand into the mist, into the incessant salt
of memory, to spice finches and sparrows speaking up
in the last of dusk with every bit of insight available
beyond the eucalyptus, above the sea, along which
we cruised blissfully half-conscious 50 years ago,
burning up every atom of oxygen that came our way
as quickly as we could because that’s all there was to do.
And this might be the place where it’s best to pause,
to count the small change, the few fair bits of fortune,
despite the blanks I’ve never managed to fill, all that
went missing between stars, content now not to waste
one more minute worrying about the road to hell.
Walk Away
There is no investment strategy
for tossing
a potato peel or even a stale bit of tortilla
to the ½ of the world
doing all the work.
I’ve long seen myself set against the stars,
against the deep
blue film of evening, much like
August roses.
Again today, no one stops to ask
about the rain
that never falls
on cabbages or
sea-dull acacias.
And by the time I sit down
and reconsider things,
it’s too late
to do anything
about them—to think
of something beyond
the imminent
consequences of our cells spilling
into the palimpsest of night.
All that’s clear
is that nothing’s been revealed
about the unsolved
equation of time and space,
given the lateness
of the hour. . . .
This could be it
for those of us
paying attention?
On paths in the park
dust scurries
this way, then that . . .
eucalyptus lining the cliff
have surrendered—
their bare arms lifted to a sky
that appears to be
tired of everything.
Hernandez said
rain calls out the dead,
but so far not a soul
has shown up offering help
as I’ve sat here
trying to unravel
the inconclusive
clouds, and what,
if any, good
hosannas sea birds send
to the blunt corners
of the sky might do?
When I reach back
into the bucket
of best guesses
there’s just the implausible
heavens
that have led me
in circles most of my life as if
the be-all
and end-all
was something,
and not nothing
more
than this azure dot
on a carousel of light,
no matter
whether I stand on the shore
and wave my hands before
before the dark immensity
or, with the last dimming
cloud, walk away. . . .
Christopher Buckley has recently edited The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine (Lynx House Press) and NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021). His work was selected for The Best American Poetry 2021 and he was a Guggenheim Fellow for 2007–2008. He also received NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984. His most recent book of poetry is One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Prize, 2023.