Autumn in California   
Kenneth Rexroth
from Penguin Modern Poets 9
Penguin Books, 1967, p.49

Autumn in California is a mild
And anonymous season, hills and valleys
Are colorless then, only the sooty green
Eucalyptus, the conifers and oaks sink deep
Into the haze; the fields are plowed, bare, waiting;
The steep pastures are tracked by the cattle;
There are no flowers, the herbage is brittle.
All night along the coast and the mountain crests
Birds go by, murmurous, high in the warm air.
Only in the mountain meadows the aspens
Glitter like goldfish moving up swift water;
Only in the desert villages the leaves
Of the cottonwoods descend in smoky air.
  Once more I wander in the warm evening
Calling the heart to order and the stiff brain
To passion. I should be thinking of dreaming, loving,
  dying,
Beauty wasting through time like draining blood,
And me alone in all the world with pictures
Of pretty women and constellations.
But I hear the clocks in Barcelona strike at dawn
And the whistles blowing for noon in Nanking.
I hear the drone, the snapping high in the air
Of planes fighting, the deep reverberant
Grunts of bombardment, the hasty clamor
Of anti-aircraft.
                         In Nanking at the first bomb,
A moon-faced, willowy young girl runs into the street,
Leaves her rice bowl spilled and her children crying,
And stands stiff, cursing quietly, her face raised to the sky.
Suddenly she bursts like a bag of water,
And then as the blossom of smoke and dust diffuses,
The walls topple slowly over her.
                                                  I hear the voices
Young, fatigued and excited, of two comrades
In a closed room in Madrid. They have been up
All night, talking of trout in the Pyrenees,
Spinoza, old nights full of riot and sherry,
Women they might have had or almost had,
Picasso, Velasquez, relativity.
The candlelight reddens, blue bars appear
In the cracks of the shutters, the bombardment
Begins again as though it had never stopped,
The morning wind is cold and dusty,
Their furloughs are over. They are shock troopers,
They may not meet again. The dead light holds
In impersonal focus the patched uniforms,
The dog-eared copy of Lenin's Imperialism,
The heavy cartridge belt, holster and black revolver butt.
     The moon rises late over Mt. Diablo,
Huge, gibbous, warm; the wind goes out,
Brown fog spreads over the bay from the marshes,
And overhead the cry of birds is suddenly
Loud, wiry, and tremulous.

Greetings b2.

   Interesting poem. I like poems, but always find myself trying to make sense out of them. This one gives me trouble in trying to understand it.

   Since the title is Autumn in California, I figure the author to be living in California and thinking of things during the autumn season. He mentions parts of Spain, so he either was there before or has an affinity with Spain.

   What confuses me is the part about Nanking, China. I checked out Nanking on the internet and discovered that there was a massacre in 1937 and 1938 by the invading Japanese:
http://www.nanking-massacre.com/

   Maybe you can figure it out, or maybe it's just poetry and I should accept it as it is.

Ralph

Hi Ralph, thanks for your comments. Poetry is a puzzle, isn't it?

This poem was not one I picked out, but given to me by a friend. I found some of these images familiar, as if I knew them. For some unnamed reason, it was helpful to me to write them out, to share them, to hear the poem as a kind of echo, an accompanyment to my life at this time. I used to live in that area of the country when I was a small child. The only thing I remember is the forests, Chinatown, and the Golden Gate bridge. Oh, yes, I believe I ran away from school one day, ran off with a little friend of mine, maybe first grade, don't know. That was before I decided one day, out of the blue, to change my name. You see, even though I was named after a queen, I thought that name was too long to spell. Maybe I'm just practical, that way. Hmmmnph.

Anyway, in my 'afterlife' there is a big house, not yet completely constructed, and there is a marshy wilderness area behind it. I have brought people through this area, during retrieval-related activities, both in dreams and in meditation. I don't know why it is important, but it is, to my way of seeing.