Two Poems on California

by John Brantingham

Mark Neuffer

In the California State of Slippage

Even the land slips under your feet here,  like nature laughing at you,  and you think about everything,

the way life was going to be and sometimes it seems that you’re in one of those silent films

that all the critics and film professors tell you are genius but in the end it’s just hammy overacting

and everyone smashing some poor bastard loveable loser over the head with a frying pan and that’s our hero

except here, the guy with a frying pan pulling the rug out beneath you in the land of earthquakes is nature,

or God if you prefer,  and you’re the loveable loser and not that loveable either.

This is the place where you live.  This is the practical joke played on you every single damn day,

and then you go inside your house and feel like having a drink, maybe nine,  but you want to wait until night

so you’re not a lush,  and you do wait,  counting it down you go outside

to watch that fucking clichéd sunset and you become a cliché too because it goes blue to orange

to red to green to blue and you’re the only one who seems to notice that it goes green

so much so that you wrote a book about it that you don’t think practically anyone understood,  but what does that matter,

it was all a big show you just watched and you’re happy and hopeful like that last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip

where our heroes go off for new adventures and you get all hopeful too and you want to scream but you’re middle aged

and don’t do that anymore,  and that’s all right because you’re laughing joy on the inside

after a day of feeling like a piece of shit.  Laughing joy and joy and joy,  and here it is

right at your feet for the night,  for all time if you want it.  Which you do.

Kaweah Gap

This place with its broad tan valley dotted here and there with foxtail pines,  this place where so much is on display,

this place where you can look to the striations of rocks to time travel back past the dinosaurs

teaches you so many things,  but the most important thing is how to die well.

You can watch it if you like in the day-to-day of the creatures strong enough to climb past the tree line,

but it’s more the silence of this place blowing an unending reminder through the grasses

at your feet that you are here and that is fine but that you will be gone soon,

and that is just as well.  A day in this place and you find peace.  A week here, and you would welcome

what is to come,  you would weep at how beautiful  the end will be.

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John Brantingham spent three summers living off grid in a tent in the High Sierra, teaching poetry and writing for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. He is the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and his work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has seven books of poetry and fiction including The Green of Sunset from Moon Tide Press, and he teaches at Mt. San Antonio College.