Ben Estes

Tired of walking and checking the lines of the tourist train that trundles through this town, famous for its pottery and brackish dune pools once visited by St. George and his dragon, and the lady with her unicorn, I stopped by at a convenient place to sit and shuck my sweet corn and let the local men hang their gates from my eyes. All they could offer were other versions of myself: soft and sweaty, sick of the big car diet dished up by Detroit and the cocktail-party and locker-room chatter I've had to tackle while touring this country's musky beaches. Choosing to drive to my next stop, I found perched upon a tall chalk cliff the statue of a broad-bodied chaser so large I could never easily handle him as a top. He'd been added on to so many times over the centuries, that it was only really possible to identify him by touch: a little more shy, perhaps, than other guys his age, an abstract clock-face jutting from the pack I could feel buckled around his waist, and such wee-wee nuts, he could only be named, I whispered,Patience. I camped there in his shadow 'til noon the next day, and drove away leaving a few of my burnt bones there, behind.

I just don't think that this is what it's supposed to feel like, shaking my big one to break the stream and make a pool for moving my tools, for they only weigh half as much when moved under water. I emerged in the morning, covered in blood and fine acid sand and decided to remain partially submerged a little while longer. Itching for more exercise, and cooled not by water but by air, I spent the afternoon collecting sea shells, and found each one heavily carved with the numbers of pretty village girls offering to take tourists to the ultimate level. A spring and summer service they offer. I meant to call one, with a headline ready on my lips, but a gull would dive down wheeling and screaming each time I tried to dial. One can fool the animals, but must forgive this wild, beautiful country.

That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental, which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh. The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings of growth and brightness, seems like a sun seen from underwater, wobbly as jelly, mocking my inability to find a job, my food stamps, and saddens me to see the teens tagging themselves in nearby places to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting other symptoms of youth while leaving their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses, mocking my desire for artwork to remain packed in straw, and in music for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in. It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess, when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries. Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read without it putting me to sleep with its out-of-date luxuriousness. So instead of reading it, I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's song And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro, hoping it would arch electrically above him with all the characteristics of fire all night, all day, and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn sun as pale as silver and fern-green skies to draw light through midnight