John Donne in California

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.