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Standing on Laguna Beach with the Ocean behind Me



The Pacific pitches a fit behind me
as if someone in Japan snapped
their end of the sheet
and fired a rolling riot of wet over the earth
to crash into the edge of Laguna.

Laguna splays out from the sand between my toes
It seeps and spreads and the piles and agglomerates
from the beach to the boardwalk
into the streets and through the shops
up, up over the steep hills
and out through the canyon road.

I'm stretching my eyeballs
I'm trying to see through it all
Straight, right on through, across the continent
all the way home to Connecticut.
That's when Laguna stops being Laguna
and I see it for what it is...
the edge of America.

Coming back toward me, from the east,
and beating back my sight right into my eye sockets,
is the whole of history. An impenetrable phalanx
A phalanx of hominids but its not a parade.
There's no order to it.
Just the chaos of America. All of it.

The Chumash, Pomo and Salinan
bleed right through the Navaho and Apache.
All of our most ancient cultures are here.
Somewhere in the back, I know I'll find
the Pequots and that's close to home for me.

This misty wall of spirits is a graying calico
Every class and definition is in there, in some thread
There are missionaries and Jews.
Muslims, witches and non-believers.
Anarchists, Republicans, Democrats and Communists
I can see farmers, miners, teachers
and office workers and accountants and lawyers.
All of the great workers of this land
caught in the glimpse of one portrait
The muscle and bone of three hundred million
caught forever for one small second.

This tsunami of cultures and languages,
this cacophony of colors and creeds,
clamoring for validation,
it rises and crashes
louder than the Pacific
louder than all of the seas
releasing their waves at once.
There's no union that I can see.
I don't hear any harmony.
No evidence of brotherhood
or sisterhood. I don't even see good will.

The only things I know I can see
and feel and understand
is the sand between my toes
and the sky over my head.
And I know we're all here
Alive and dead alike
We've got the whole continent under us
and the whole universe over us.
And those are the things that make us one.




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