Christopher Buckley’s most recent book is Spanish Notebook, Shabda Press, 2017.
Looking West from Montecito, Late Afternoon
- Beneath hills of agave and eucalyptus,
- beneath the Spanish palms and walled estates,
- I look across the bird refuge
- to East Beach . . . mist in the channel
- and only the outline
- of the islands floating
- vaguely on the blue, just above
- the tide and spindrift
- choruses of surf.
- Half of everyone I’ve loved
- is buried in the cemetery
- on the cliff here,
- or on the sea out there.
- I remember the tangerine trees
- just off the road
- in Greenworth Place
- the overgrown bamboo —
- we’d drop our bikes
- in the high wild grass and
- the clouds would trail us
- until we turned home
- with the dark.
- Now, I think
- the gulls and white face coots
- have as much of an inner life as I.
- The clouds keep pressing.
- I have been here 54 years —
- I don’t know
- that I want to go
- anywhere else.
Drinking Champagne
- When he first tasted sparkling wine, Dom Perignon
- imagined he was drinking stars,
- bubbles like pearls, rising through liquid the thin
- color of beaten gold . . .
- and now, overlooking the sea, the moon dribbling out
- its dabs of light, fingering
- the silk trees’ old thoughts, I feel it’s as close as we are
- likely to come to celestial rewards,
- though if I didn’t know better in my bones, I’d still
- swear I would be the one
- to get out of here alive, the one to forgive the stars
- for misleading us all this time.
Christopher Buckley’s Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright award in creative writing, and four Pushcart Prizes. His most recent book is Spanish Notebook, Shabda Press, 2017.