It’s just past jacaranda season in coastal southern California, specific landscapes of which my heart calls home. These trees are graceful and shady much of the year, and I notice them with vague gratitude. Their bloomtime—late May or into June, depending—paints entire neighborhoods in purple.

It’s astonishing, set against the season-typical morning marine layer locals call “May gray” and “June gloom.” (I call it restful.) Equally so on the hot blue skies more folks associate with SoCal.

This poem* isn’t exactly about any of that. But it starts with this season: its memories and its longings.

Jacaranda Season

1.
There are powers in this world
I said to my mother last night
that are not our God.
From this mountain
I see how the pattern of waves

begins a long way out.
A strange wind
rattles from every quarter.
I leash myself to its many wrists.
We walk.

2.
Cloud crouches
low on the slopes
these still and sea-damp dawns.
Some of jacaranda’s thousand lips
have fallen to earth already.

It is hard to die, but I think
it could be here, this blue-soft moment.
I could curl inside a honeysuckle bloom
and dream
sweetly.

3.
I am standing above the velvet sea
and speaking the names of my dead.
Sun is leaving kisses on my face.
My left hip aches a little
but my legs are strong.

In my favorite season, I try again
to love the moment
without wanting to keep the moment.
The little inverted bowl of the half moon
spills out blue

blue
blue
blue

*The print version can be found in Camas magazine’s Winter 2024 issue.

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I read so much lately. (A great relief, to do so with attention again after years of struggle.) This morning, Pico Iyer’s Aflame, a meditation on silence, that centers itself geographically in a specific location important to my own heart and thought: the monastic community of New Camaldoli in Big Sur.

Iyer records a monk saying to him, as they walk above the sea, speaking slowly of life, death, faith: “The longing itself is the ecstasy.”

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In a previous version of this poem—which happens to have been composed at New Camaldoli—I wrote, “…to love the moment / without wanting to leave the moment.”

I went back and forth many times over that choice. Ultimately I chose “keep” for clarity. But I’m trying to decide if they mean something like the same thing.

Certainly they were groping toward the same large idea. To keep a moment—to fix it in memory and hold it there—implies leaving it. To want to keep it implies wanting to leave it. A longing to have experienced something, to be holding onto it as yours.

Indeed, I am always rushing toward the next thing, even while I’m actively trying to store up (to keep) whatever beautiful or useful experience or landscape or person is present to me now. Past/present/future all tangled up.

I’m not alone in experiencing this longing, and its disorientations. The literature touching the subject usually talks about how it’s the present that gets lost here, and how that impoverishes our lives.

Probably. But also: “The longing itself is the ecstasy”?