STATE LINES
California Poetry
“Little Sur” is David St. John’s lyric monument to a pleasurable memory. The poem is made of vivid impressions gathered from an experience on that patch of California coast. Action verbs like “collapses,” “shoulder,” “drift” and “lift” give his lines a muscular, sensual vibe. This is not surprising in a poem describing nature, but it makes even more sense when we read the poem’s last few lines and see that “Little Sur” is tied up with a dreamlike vision of St. John’s lover — a figure of stillness at the center of the dynamic scene. To him, his love in that moment feels as deep and old as the redwoods and canyon found there.
Little Sur
As in the beginning the early tide at last collapses
& recedes as porous knuckles of rock Shoulder their way above the foam where cormorants
drift & settle & as the day begins inhaling These last wisps of morning fog & rags of sunlight
lift into the redwoods rising up along The canyon walls & in the inlet below us elephant seals
announce their daily dawn arguments With those lessons of pre-history & your hair floats across
the bed as easily as strands of the ruby kelp That just yesterday rose silently beside the kayak as you
carved a singular quiet along the waking bay From “The Last Troubadour” by David St. John. Copyright © 2017 by David St. John. Reprinted courtesy of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
David St. John
is the author of 11 collections of poetry and a volume of essays, interviews and reviews titled “Where the Angels Come Toward Us.” He is a professor and chairman of the English Department at the University of Southern California. Born in Fresno in 1949, he lives in Venice Beach. David Roderick is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley. He is author of “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.”