smiling out the window whipping by,
singing to praise whosoever proffered me this Sunday
yet another.
How devastatingly beautiful, I think, is
the black lab, leashed and lapping along, also
the wino, shuffling sidewalks, hands-a-pockets,
the joggers blonding ponytails go Swish! Swish!
storefronts glimmer in the early earthly glow
and by god the Bikers! - those sinew-sleek and anatomic bodies
humping their sleek machines uphill.
I stop to fill gas (!!4.29 a Steal!)
And watch big-screen television while minding the pump,
think: "this is the donning of the age of aquarius,"
lean against my car door and starearound
the other strangers leaning on car doors too,
all of us an island - a mountain underwater.
Back on the road keep zooming till I reach
Laguna! - 'la pieta' draped across the knees of coast,
ellegant as her name, I think,
if famous to the world she came then famous she'll return
into the sea - streets, shops, palms and all...
Laguna with her perfectly groomed every-thing's,
nature tamed and manicured you know
it's all a lot a picture show.
Laguna with her snowy-white teeth,
sun-kissed shoulders and,
bourgeois-blue eyes.
(but before Laguna or even Dana Point this morning
remember leaving San Clemente...)
San Clemente where the curved roads go curving
in curves o'er hills of swerving swells,
where all manner of surf shops, pubs and parlors,
suburbia of Pendleton Military Base and outgrowth of such,
San Clemente where I awoke
(on memorial day nonetheless)
on the roof of said suburbia.
San Clemente where I awoke to the sound of palm fronds breezing,
on the roof where the whole gangofus had slept
in a jumble of drunken comforts and pillow-arms,
on the roof of Southern California with stars close as my nose,
where because of rain throughout the night
the whole gang one by one had left, grumpily wet,
- except for Elliott and Me, who've slept in puddles before and didn't mind.
And so now I go zooming up the Highway Pacific 1
--that ocean-hugging highway where a couple Octobers ago
E and I had gone rushing South through foggy gloom
with mad goal to cover old Oregon's coast in a single weekend,
and also in order to throw the huppiest halloween bash this side 'o the galaxy,
and also to swim in seas of midnight naked and free,
and also to look up and see that nocturnal flock of gulls go squawking overhead in
one big white feathery omen'd troup, as if to say to us:
"Ahoy, feather your friggots boys, wa-hah!"
And so now I go zooming North up that unbeleivably self-same highway,
halfway believing, for the wonderful power of these memories, that
I'll run into E and Me (any second now...)
coming the other direction.
