☆ A poem for Christmas Day, 2023
Holiday Season in Silicon Valley: A winter view through the bare trees. An unexpected shower. Lost clouds lingering along the bottom of Monte Bello Ridge. For many of us locals, this is a distinctive time of year: full of reflection about change, about remembering, about forgetting, about hope. Peter Coe Verbica hits many of these notes in his lyrical poem that journeys from Costa Rica to the crests of the Diablo Range. An Opp Now exclusive. And from all of us at Opp Now—Lauren, Jackson, Lucy, Jeff, & Christopher—we wish you an inspirational Holiday Season and a New Year full of (we had to say it) unlimited opportunity. :-)
A Damn Good Cigar
© 2023 by Peter Coe Verbica
My first word
burst through the clouds
like the birth and death
of a fallen angel.
This is the conversation
we have with our better selves:
paint on canvas
all afternoon
with a sable brush.
We all have our experiences
and you shared yours with me:
in an unmarked harbor
sleep eluded you,
so you pulled yourself
up the sailboat’s ladder
and looked into the warm darkness,
listening
like a wild animal,
looking to eat or mate.
Two of the strangest sounds
erased the quietude:
the syncopation of air
from the blowholes
of porpoises
and screaming monkeys
from the shore.
Costa Rica can be that way,
I imagine.
Like any place. Like people.
Incongruous.
I’ve never been one to sail away.
In the foothills,
on a fifth-generation land grant,
I pray for rain
to knock the dust off oat husks
and fill the cups
of hollow-stemmed thistles.
To satiate the cracked tiles
in the stock ponds
so that does and fawns
can see their faces in nature’s mirror.
Season’s heat here
makes open oceans unimaginable,
unless you’re talking
about oceans of hours.
(I have days and weeks and months of those.)
You know where I am,
this time of year.
Riding fences and checking barbed wire.
Today, on a ridge,
I look down into the valley:
The red dairy, horse and hay barns.
The white-washed ranch houses.
The disced fields.
There are some things
you don’t say out loud:
Sins of the dead,
the combinations of safes,
how our flesh yearns for others.
(You leave these folded in your pocket,
like a trapper’s knife.)
Today, underneath
the shelter of branches,
and blue-green oak leaves:
The wind weeps
with both joy and sorrow.
We contrast each other:
you stare
into the warm night,
barefoot on the deck of
a ship upon the water.
And me observing
the rusting rays of the day,
wearing
leather boots
upon the hot earth.
I draw upon your memory,
feel it heat up my lungs,
ethereal,
as if it’s smoke
from a forest fire,
or perhaps just a damn good cigar.
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