A Poem for Breakfast
Dear Dave: Rain five days and I love it. A relief from sandy arroyos, buzzards and buttes, and a growing season consisting strictly of June. Here, the grass explodes and trees rage black green deep as the distance they rage in I suppose all said, this is my soul, the salmon rolling in the strait and salt air loaded with cream for our breathing. And around the bend a way, Dungeness Spit. I don’t need any guide but the one I’ve got, the one you threw the world like a kiss of wind ending hot summer, though of course I am seldom called lover these days and in bad moments when I walk the beach I claim the crabs complain. Aside from those momentary failures I am soaring, looping the loop over blackfish schools and millions of candlefish darting in and out of glint. I think because the sea continually divides the world into dark and gleam, the northwest sky relieves us from the pressure of always choosing by being usually gray, but of course that’s only theory. Not real accounting for calm. The stable chunky ferry is leaving for Keystone. Perch curve around the pilings oblivious in their bulk to porgies and the starfish napping tight to barnacles. They all remind me of Kenny, a boy I fished with from the pier at Seola. When we got older I saw he was subnormal and I saw the space between us grow, and finally we saw each other in passing in White Center and didn’t speak. We don’t take others by the hand and say: we are called people. The power to make us better is limited even in the democratic sea. Discovery of cancer, a broken back, our inability to pass our final exam - I guess the rain is finally getting me down. What matter? I plan to spend my life dependent on moon and tide and the tide is coming, creeping over the rocks, washing the remains of crippled fish back deep to the source, renewing the driftwood supply and the promise of all night fires on the beach, stars and dreams of girls, and that’s as rich as I’ll ever get. We are called human. C’iao. Dick
from 31 Letters and 13 dreams, poems by Richard Hugo
It’s been so long since I had poems for breakfast. I’d forgotten how delicious and nourishing they can be on a cold and dark almost winter morning.
Enjoy!