Tess Taylor: a poem for El Cerrito, California
Nathan Rein says:
A gorgeous poem that reflects, I think, a lot of my own feelings about my adopted home, a struggling but lively former steel town in southeastern Pennsylvania.
SONG FOR EL CERRITO
tess taylor
I used to hate its working-class bungalows, grid planning,
power-lines sawing hillsides. It shamed me
the way my parents did for not making more money.
Now it looks like a Diebenkorn.
Now I want even the bad wood siding
in our living room, my mother’s aging
books on modern Indian thought. Her tanpura
in sunlight. I want fox-weed in railroad trestles,
the endangered frogs in our gully.
I want a lemon tree.
On San Pablo, polyester collectibles, a folk-song store,
the “All-Button Emporium: Open 10-4 Saturday’s.”
How did love lodge in these?
It might be how marigold light
forgives even the traffic islands.
December only yellows the gingkoes and reddens the maples.
A stream smells rich under our house.
For Christmas, my sister and I steal
persimmons from neighbors’ yards.
Ten years on, I discover
how I keep falling in love here
among pickups and blackberry brambles.
Tonight it happened again:
Read more at www.swinkmag.com
We drove a bad car to the beach.
