April 2022
Bio Note: In the 'long ago' I had taken a grad seminar in T. S. Eliot from the Yeats' scholar, Levine of Harvard, and in that course I learned something about contrapuntal technique. In rereading "Ghost Trees" several years after it was written, it occurred to me that there may be something contrapuntal in the poem, however those 'independent melodic lines' often confront the sea-harshness of other lines. All in all, it is a poem of sensual contrasts locked in a series of images--awkwardness dances with the sublime--or so I'd like to think. It's one of the poems from Nightshades.
Photo credit: j.lewis
The Cypresses of Monterey Bay stand with green flat-tops, like stroppy berets, the rest all trunk, shiny-smooth & gray, randomly broken 8’s & twisted 3’s polished by vandal sand & wind. Here is one, with hand-on-hip, & its head, a flat branch around an empty circle—ready to strut across a wild stage, all akimbo as if on some chilly carnal mission. "Eerie," tourists say, like the stick people who walk the beach day after day, who must live near the sea at any price, as if the ocean would fill an empty heart through which sea wind blows, & what they say they say to themselves as if no one else had ever been, that they too had made some memorable performance that cannot be recalled, some thought that returned only to leave again.
Originally published in Innisfree and included in Nightshades,February 2022.
©2022 Michael Gessner
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