LA Weekly Poetry: Introduction to California Poetics

Flickr/Omar Omar

Introduction to California Poetics
by Jeannine Hall Gailey

In a place of perpetual climate control
you cannot get too angry at the world
you cannot get too angry at rununculus
who throw their wide unfragrant faces to the light
you cannot be angry with the hummingbirds
who winter here, confusing feeders with fuscias,
or the girls who wear hot pants with shearling boots
in January. You cannot be angry, even with
the water crisis, with all the swimming pools
and sprinklers, with the careless swerving
of giant cars from lane to lane. You will eat
your avocado or asparagus, your citrus straight
from the tree, you will see the goats and grapevines,
you cannot be angry, with all this blue sky, dimmed
hardly at all by the brown layer of smog,
with the hard sunlight glinting off the cold ocean,
the unwelcoming skin of the date palm,
the oleander continuing to bloom along highways.
You will not wear a sweater and huddle by a notebook.
You will ski, or swim, you will hike by giant eucalyptus trees,
you will startle egrets and pelicans in a salt marsh,
you will forget you ever wrote books at all,
you will no longer regret, you will throw away your sweaters
and burn down your library, you will go mad
tearing at the easy beauty, the soft golden sheen of skin,
you will break the earth itself, turning to dust, unremembered.