The picture above was taken from the shore of San Francisco Bay on a late afternoon--the sun was bright on the water.  I live near this shore, and can see the hills and the water from my home.

This is a poem about how the first portrait to be drawn--and it is also a poem about love.

I have included a page from my notebook featuring part of the poem's very first draft.

PORTRAIT

An ancient story tells how the first-ever portrait was made by a woman drawing around the shadow of her lover's profile.  
                                R. B. Kitaj
 
In secret, behind the orchard,
and you with so little time
you cannot lie down
among the trees.

Hot--the dry river
shivers with mirage

and the donkeys
grazing before the hills

vanish in the rising
breath of the grass.

Day stone, noon
the dust that was stone.
In haste on your way
to your father's chambers,

with your new signet ring, son
of a vineyard-owning home,

you turn again, again
on leaving me, soon to be
married soon to ride

to the distant capitol.
Touching me,
even now, your voice
cradling my name

while I stroke
your shadow’s
trace and stay long,

long after with
the faithful earth.

When I was growing up on Southern California, we loved to go to the beach.  But the beach, and the ocean, were not simple places.  They were profound.

TIDE


What was amazing was
we wanted to go there, jumped
up and down when Dad said we could
pile into the car.  The road stopped
where it washed away, jagged
green-haired slabs of
sidewalks, bad footing, rusted
monstrous engine parts.
Dad smoked Viceroys,

and now and then the thread
of tobacco would touch us
where we teetered among the suck holes
of sea anemones and the cringing
crabs with their black, jointed legs,
cavities full of silent water
all the way to the waves
tearing themselves to pieces.
Among the concrete chunks
deep-fried with barnacles,

my sisters found mother-of-pearl
shards, sand dollars, planting one foot,
then another, almost falling, and I
found objects that had owned human
intent but had altered, spikes fat with rust,
bolts swelling from the inside
with corruption, while every sound
even our own shouted names,
vanished, one big lung holding all the air.

ROOFERS

We can't breathe
the tarry air, and they don't even
slow down in this stunned
twilight, yelling, the kitchen
faucet trembling, the ancient
glistening slabs loaded over the
blue flame.  Their steps
crunch overhead and they
hurl another load of

cedar shingles into the rumbling
dumpster, bantering,
tossing scraps of song.
We understand so little
of what holds our lives
from cold, from storm.
Carpentry, plumbing,
gravity, sooner or later
we awaken to need.  But where
do they come from,

these fanatics balancing
on the eaves, bounding
down the ladder,
stepping out on nothing?
More rain hours away,
nails ricochet, spinning
in the porch light, night
descending as they stumble,
nearly fall, working blind
and laughing, splinter-bit,
claw-hammered, singing
the fossil dark.