"Black Ships Drawn Up on a White Beach"

Take me
there, oh, take me there.

To the sea wall
in Robinson Jeffers country.
We were like cypress, wind-silhouetted on
the rocky coast,
like ships whose green is almost black,
not like an old man and an old woman, though
bending away from the wind, like those Monterey
evergreens.
I was watching surfers, not black ships. The long
beach was white and farther down
the coast was the poet's stone tower.
Now that I am not on that coastline anymore,
looking out the window has assumed such importance;
as if I were in a tower, like Rapunzel, yet
no length of braid could any longer draw you up.

You, who are never the same person.

I'd like to send a letter to The King of Spain,
the man who remains constant
because he is from a fairy tale.
I want to tell him
about the Diamond Dog
who followed my father
out of my life. How the dog
runs away every time I call him.

Angela tells me there is a white dwarf star with a core of diamond,
twenty-five-hundred square miles in diameter.
It is located in the constellation Centaurus,
and is fifty light years from Earth. She
says, "The cosmic gem is the remains of a star that was once
much like our sun."

                                                 How lucky
to have a father who sailed away, rather than one
who was a disappointment in the flesh.
There is great drama possible when lies are told,
for the everyday need not intervene
its dull self. Living dogs
slather, smell fuggish, shed hair, jump on
clean clothes or furniture with muddy paws, lick your
face, sniff your crotch. But a Diamond Dog
is a little piece of crystalline motion,
running like a starship, white on the black beach.

Odysseus, the father, returned after twenty years of sailing,
had sailor's eyes and saw everything.
But he would not have recognized
this Diamond Dog when it greeted his return. "Argos,"
he called it. A premonition?

Oh, take me there,
take me to the star in the horse-man constellation,
whose core is miles of diamond. There
I'd be able to see the "black ships
drawn up
on the white beach,"
drawn close to me. I, lingering
on this seawall;
they, not furling sails or running away.

                                  (Note)

Cerberus

So that's what you've been
running towards,
Diamond Dog! I thought you
jumped out of the ash heap
to follow my father,
who was walking away from me,
past the palm tree with a trunk
as wide as an old Redwood,
away past the neighbors' lantana hedge that
drew butterflies,
past the Friends Church and down
to the boulevard, the King's Highway,
El Camino Reale. But

you weren't heading towards
San Diego to my father's
WW II aircraft carrier.

You weren't following.
You were leading.

All these years, I thought you were following him
away from me.

Why didn't I realize you had been crushed
into diamond by the heat and pressure of the Underworld?

Perhaps you only tumbled out
of the ashes, in my dream, because I had been trying to breach
a place forbidden
to the living?

Diamond Dog, you've reappeared,
in my seventieth year.
Now
it is I with whom you travel, not
my dead father. No longer are you an image of hidden beauty
deserting me;
but of mortality, or immortality.
Either one—the same panting diamond breath.