Villa Song

I’ll go where the rent horses lumber past and
the night softness returns anciently:

a place of old California built by hands that have
faded through wars and hopeless returns, through

radio waves, earthquakes, firelight; voices cracked
and straining through human sweat, voices uprising;

I haven’t seen much of that where I am now.
To touch the stony stillness, to smell the cut sweet

harvest of the late summer vineyard nearby
and wave simply to the walkers on the road

to Big Sur; I am romanced by what I think
this place once was. This town of California

has cooled down; the dry mud roads over which
my Tevas trod "on the once-dusty bridal path

between mists and arroyos; yes, to this place
goes my old-tune heart, for an often told

story of a Mexican gal with a gut-string guitar
is chanted in passing by a leathery type that knows

Southlanders like me wonder at their mystery.  He says
that she will sing to me of wine and midnight, softly,

lavenderly a villa song of a broken lover return’d.
Yes, and the melody is more than remembered:

She sighs in the dry gulch
She pauses in the desert bloom
She is Morongo, a California variation;
She is Donner Pass
She is a siesta, she is beechwood
She is Zuma glass
But now many arroyos are concrete
That even the eagles can’t see rodent tracks
Along the scorpion-coloured wash.
Dust and heat; Duarte’s brand on
The mountainside; the Mexican rose with
Her elder guitar, heralding the lostness
Of old California with a gaze conquered
And far, beyond this or any lens.

I’ll go where the rent horses lumber past and
The night softness returns anciently:

A villa of old California, well-worn and wined,
Sounding of desert, silver, and mesquite.

Reviews

[emmajoy]

To me. there's an acute sadness in and to this poem, a place where past walks with you. Maybe it's because of the lyrics, maybe because the villa is well-worn, life saddened .. tho that final line, 'Sounding of desert, silver, and mesquite' really does lure the reader into another time and place.