John Donne in California
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Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or is
Jerusalem? pondered John Donne,
who never stood among these strenuous,
huge, wind-curried hills, their green
gobleted just now with native poppies’
opulent red-gold, where New World lizards run
among strange bells, thistles wear the guise
of lizards, and one shining oak is poison;
or cast an eye on lofted strong-arm
redwoods’ fog-fondled silhouette,
their sapling wisps among the ferns in time
more his (perhaps) than our compeer: here at
the round earth’s numbly imagined rim,
its ridges drowned in the irradiating vat
of evening, the land ends; the magnesium
glare whose unbridged nakedness is bright
beyond imagining, begins. John Donne,
I think, would have been more at home
than the frail wick of metaphor I’ve brought
to see by, and cannot, for the conflagration
of this nightfall’s utter strangeness.
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