The Beatitudes of Malibu

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips

i

Walking across the PCH, we looked

Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen,

Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.

I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled

At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights

As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite-

Anapestic song of sea and air — 

The raw and sudden crick of crickets — 

The cars, suddenly silent as cows — 

And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.

ii

A poem is a view of the Pacific

And the Pacific, and the Pacific

Taking in its view of the Pacific,

And the Pacific as the Pacific

(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific)

Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,

Closing. It or she or he is merely,

Which means it or she or he is a mar.

But a mar made up of  temperament and

Tempo — the red weather in the heart.

iii

I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:

Santa Monica behind me, the ocean

To my left, Jupiter high above me,

And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked

With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays

In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills

Like the tricolor of a country made

Of  beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.

Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing;

Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.

iv

Along the thin pedestrian passage

Beside the PCH, just off Sunset,

Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends

And lies and facts — Jews and Blacks being

Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy

Like bruschetta. He storms at the police

Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt

Like a toga. He schools them his toga

Wisdom from toga times. He offers them

His toga. They offer him a ride — .

v

Arun’s car carried us like metaphor

In a poem or painting; moving meaning;

Moving the current; being the current;

The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;

Still, even as we speed on the 110,

The music in my head, the Jupiter

Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean

As it unfurls in the vapor trail of

Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,

Like a nocturnal flower calling you.

vi

Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surged

Up, like marginalia on a newly

Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions,

Fiery accusations of its own

Brilliance that descend into indifference.

We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and

It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.

Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.

But I should know better, if just because

You can smell the injustice in the air.

vii

The Pacific encircles me. Slowly.

As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better

Said, I only understand it this way:

By feeling like a stranger at its blue

Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his

Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay

As though some Cathay exists and be glad.

No, the differences we have should be felt

And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack;

A power to take in what you can’t take back.

viii

The old hocus of this ocean’s focus

On pulling its waves over the soft surf

Like a skin pulled down tight over the top

Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus.

We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’s

Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells

No chunk of haiku could think to charter.

It was like the eighth day of creation

In the eighth line of a poem — she sang,

She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.