| Big Sur (Impressions) By Richard Cody I Castro Creek splashes toward the Pacific, abandoned to gravity and something like enthusiasm informing the liquid chatter. It is a hopeful sound despite what I know – that happy babble must soon be lost in the surf which pounds and crashes and foams below. The ocean is a presence here. Even in the folds of mountains close among the shadows of the trees, away from the rolling tide and cool salty breeze, the ocean maintains itself in memory (those waters are deeper, the shores more broad than any in reality). II Trees outnumber human beings here. Oak and Pine and California Redwood make a minority of man. We walk beneath them, consider them inanimate. The truth is we simply move too fast to see the reality of a tree. The quick pulse at our core impels us forward into life. A Redwood only moves toward the sun. III On the hearth, as we watch, the slow consummation of fire and wood. It was a pine tree. Or is that Oak glowing in the crucible of flames? Neither now, the log has been transformed into heat and light and shadows on the wall. All around us now is a night that can be described only as profound. City dwellers like myself have known only a false night. Here, blank staring darkness takes on real meaning when you step away from the pale aureole of the porch light. But step away a moment or two, gaze to heaven with moonlit eyes and you will see things that are merely ghosts in city skies. Sunlight reincarnated in the silver moon. Stars shining a thousand years in the past. Constellations mapping the sky. I could step outside now, begin counting those points of light, and continue until the day I die. IV A few days away from daily news and the buzz of huddled masses, the general drone in which cities speak, I find myself listening to something I have never heard before: silence. The cackle of crows in the morning, the bark of dogs at night, the hum of cars spinning along Highway 1- These sounds come and go, the silence here is never done. The Santa Lucia Mountains are haunted by it. On the beaches it hides beneath the crash of waves. It is only punctuated by the voice of the sea. The quiet here is a secret proclaiming itself constantly. Listen,it seems to say. |
| Another poem inspired by Big Sur (see 27 Years), a landscape that is beautiful beyond it's stunning geography and a sacred place for me. |
| Copyright 2004 Richard Cody |