CALIFORNIA POEMS

California On The Passing Of Tennyson

All silent.... So, he lies in state....
Our redwoods drip and drip with rain....
Against our rock-locked Golden Gate
We hear the great, sad, sobbing main.
.....

Joaquin Miller

The Sheets

We used to meet
on this corner
in the same wind.
It fought us up the hill
.....

Erica Jong

We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain

call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the
depression era.
.....

Charles Bukowski

Little Fugue

The yew's black fingers wag:
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.
.....

Sylvia Plath

California Prodigal

FOR DAVID P?B

The eye follows, the land
Slips upward, creases down, forms
.....

Maya Angelou

Roan Stallion

The dog barked; then the woman stood in the doorway, and hearing
iron strike stone down the steep road
Covered her head with a black shawl and entered the light rain;
she stood at the turn of the road.
.....

Robinson Jeffers

California

Why should he not have been allowed
To thread with peaceful feet the crowd
Which filled that Christian street?
The Decalogue he had observed,
.....

Ambrose Bierce

Old Counsel

Of The Young Master of a Wrecked California Clipper


Come out of the Golden Gate,
.....

Herman Melville

Dr.springer

Lines on presenting Dr. Springer with a diamond ring, when he
was bidding farewell to Ingersoll, and was about journeying
to California.

.....

James Mcintyre

Poem (lana Turner Has Collapsed!)

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
.....

Frank O'hara

Address At The Opening Of The California Theatre, San Francisco, January 19, 1870

Brief words, when actions wait, are well:
The prompter's hand is on his bell;
The coming heroes, lovers, kings,
Are idly lounging at the wings;
.....

Bret Harte

An Arctic Vision

Where the short-legged Esquimaux
Waddle in the ice and snow,
And the playful Polar bear
Nips the hunter unaware;
.....

Bret Harte

Poem Delivered On The Fourteenth Anniversary Of California's Admission Into The Union, Septemb

We meet in peace, though from our native East
The sun that sparkles on our birthday feast
Glanced as he rose on fields whose dews were red
With darker tints than those Aurora spread.
.....

Bret Harte

Sunny New South Wales

We often hear men boast about the land which gave them birth,
And each one thinks his native land the fairest spot on earth;
In beauty, riches, power, no land can his surpass;
To his, all other lands on earth cannot even hold a glass.
.....

Banjo Paterson

Two Items

STRONG rocks hold up the riksdag bridge ... always strong river waters shoving their shoulders against them ...
In the riksdag to-night three hundred men are talking to each other about more potatoes and bread for the Swedish people to eat this winter.
In a boat among calm waters next to the running waters a fisherman sits in the dark and I, leaning at a parapet, see him lift a net and let it down ... he waits ... the waters run ... the riksdag talks ... he lifts the net and lets it down ...
Stars lost in the sky ten days of drizzle spread over the sky saying yes-yes.
.....

Carl Sandburg

Winter

The pungent smells of a California winter,
Grayness and rosiness, an almost transparent full moon.
I add logs to the fire, I drink and I ponder.

.....

Czeslaw Milosz

George Mullen's Confession

For the sake of guilty conscience, and the heart that ticks the
time
Of the clockworks of my nature, I desire to say that I'm
A weak and sinful creature, as regards my daily walk
.....

James Whitcomb Riley

How We Kept The Day.

I.
The great procession came up the street,
With clatter of hoofs and tramp of feet;
There was General Jones to guide the van,
.....

Will Carleton

The Golden Whales Of California

Part I.A Short Walk Along the Coast

Yes, I have walked in California,
And the rivers there are blue and white.
.....

Vachel Lindsay

A Promise To California

A PROMISE to California,
Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon:
Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain,
to teach robust American love;
.....

Walt Whitman

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
.....

Jack Spicer

Ho For California!

Rouse ye, Yankees, from your dreaming!
See that vessel, strong and bold,
On her banner proudly streaming,
California for gold!
.....

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Facing West From California's Shores

FACING west, from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the
land of migrations, look afar,
.....

Walt Whitman

Sierran Song

To the California Sierra Club

Come climb the mountain trails with me,
Where pine-trees plume the sky,
.....

Harriet Monroe

Winter Stars

My father once broke a man's hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
.....

Larry Levis

Judex Judicatus

Judge Armstrong, when the poor have sought your aid,
To be released from vows that they have made
In haste, and leisurely repented, you,
As stern as Rhadamanthus (Minos too,
.....

Ambrose Bierce

Night: San Francisco

Rain drenches the patio stones.
All night was spent waiting
for an earthquake, and instead

.....

Deborah Ager

Flying At Forty

You call me
courageous,
I who grew up
gnawing on books,
.....

Erica Jong

At The California Institute Of Technology

I don't care how God-damn smart
these guys are:     I'm bored.

Itâ??s been raining like hell all day long
.....

Richard Brautigan

From My Last Years

FROM my last years, last thoughts I here bequeath,
Scatter'd and dropt, in seeds, and wafted to the West,
Through moisture of Ohio, prairie soil of Illinois--through Colorado,
California air,
.....

Walt Whitman

Henry James At The Pacific

-- Coronado Beach, California, March, 1905

In a hotel room by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
.....

Donald Justice

Song Of The Redwood-tree

A CALIFORNIA song!
A prophecy and indirection--a thought impalpable, to breathe, as air;
A chorus of dryads, fading, departing--or hamadryads departing;
A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky,
.....

Walt Whitman

Head, Perhaps Of An Angel

limestone, with traces of polychrony, c. 1250

Point Dume was the point,
he said, but we never came close,
.....

Debora Greger

Sheep

Thousands of sheep, soft-footed, black-nosed sheep-
one by one going up the hill and over the fence-one by
one four-footed pattering up and over-one by one wiggling
their stub tails as they take the short jump and go
.....

Carl Sandburg

Edwin Booth

An old actor at the Player's Club told me that Edwin Booth
first impersonated Hamlet when a barnstormer in California.
There were few theatres, but the hotels were provided
with crude assembly rooms for strolling players.
.....

Vachel Lindsay

In Southern California

Where the cocoa and cactus are neighbors,
Where the fig and the fir tree are one;
Where the brave corn is lifting bent sabres
And flashing them far in the sun;
.....

Joaquin Miller

A Carol Of Harvest, For 1867

A song of the good green grass!
A song no more of the city streets;
A song of farms--a song of the soil of fields.

.....

Walt Whitman

The Voice Of The California Dove

Come, listen O love, to the voice of the dove,
Come, hearken and hear him say,
"There are many Tomorrows, my love, my love,
There is only one Today."
.....

Joaquin Miller

California Madrigal

On The Approach Of Spring


Oh, come, my beloved, from thy winter abode,
.....

Bret Harte

California's Greeting To Seward

We know him well: no need of praise
Or bonfire from the windy hill
To light to softer paths and ways
The world-worn man we honor still.
.....

Bret Harte

Concepcion De Arguello

Presidio De San Francisco, 1800


I
.....

Bret Harte

Part 8 Of Trout Fishing In America

A RETURN TO THE COVER OF

THIS BOOK

.....

Richard Brautigan

Epitaphs For Two Players

I. EDWIN BOOTH

An old actor at the Player's Club told me that Edwin Booth first impersonated Hamlet when a barnstormer in California. There were few theatres, but the hotels were provided with crude assembly rooms for strolling players.

.....

Vachel Lindsay

California City Landscape

On a mountain-side the real estate agents
Put up signs marking the city lots to be sold there.
A man whose father and mother were Irish
Ran a goat farm half-way down the mountain;
.....

Carl Sandburg

Song Of The Exposition

AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
To fill the gross, the torpid bulk with vital religious fire;
.....

Walt Whitman

From Paumanok Starting

FROM Paumanock starting, I fly like a bird,
Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;
To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,
To Kanada, till I absorb Kanada in myself--to Michigan then,
.....

Walt Whitman

In California During The Gulf War

Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

.....

Denise Levertov

A Supermarket In California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
.....

Allen Ginsberg

California Hills In August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
.....

Dana Gioia

Starting From Paumanok

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city--or on
.....

Walt Whitman