At Año Nuevo State Park
Watching sand seep into so many tennis shoes,
I am pleased to be wearing my galoshes.
We all amble like toddlers on such soft footing.
Even those with mustaches look fey.
Like a mother’s voice calling from just outside of sleep,
the sun glows faintly behind a wall of cloud.
We arrive at our white-haired docent.
She looks so alone up there with her knowledge.
I want to hug her and tell her we will be kind,
but I can’t be certain among this group of strangers.
She leads us up a dune. “Us,” I whisper
and hang onto the “s.”
At the top, a man asks me to remove myself
from a picture he’s trying to take of his daughters.
It’s one less album I don’t belong in. Still,
I take it personally. I watch the Pacific’s horizon
and crane my neck to see a hundred feet further
down earth’s curvature. Nothing.
What land would I see if my neck kept on craning?
What families live there and what do they name their cats?
A tap on my shoulder. It’s the man,
laughing and pointing at two seals in copulation.
| Masin Persina |
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levelheaded: At Año Nuevo State Park
If you read this poem from top left to bottom right, lending roughly equal weight to each word, you’re sure to glean something from its solid language and description. But if you read this poem from top left to bottom right and linger on the connections between the final words of its couplets, you’ll notice more intricate and humanizing relationships than the traditional reading provides.
Masin Persina, in “At Año Nuevo State Park,” creates a scheme that is an amalgamation of both sonic and conceptual relationships of varying proportions. That the poem is written in couplet form is a major hint we should pay particular attention to each set of lines.
The first end-words are “tennis shoes” and “galoshes.” The sh and s sounds correspond, and so do the nouns themselves, both types of shoes, accoutrements we humans employ, separating ourselves from unshod animals. At times, the correspondences even continue into the following couplet: line two’s “galoshes” bleeds into a kind of slant conceptual agreement with line three’s “footing”; line four’s “fey” holds hands with “sleep.”
Though the speaker is skeptical regarding his peers’ capability to “be kind” to the docent, Blanche DuBois’ dependence “on the kindness of strangers” is optimistically spot lit and rejuvenated with our end-word-heavy reading. “[W]hisper” relies on that prominent s sound while the couplet enacts the speaker’s push into a very human pronoun (“Us”) of the otherwise guttural sound uh. Uh needs s, thus the hanging onto. There’s the comparison of “myself” to “his daughters,” and “craning” to “cats” (the first definition of “crane” that pops up in our dictionary refers to the bird). This animal couplet, being penultimate, is a fine lead-in to the last one.
Taken at face value, the poem’s final couplet has the man “laughing” and adolescently gesturing toward the park’s mating seals. However, the conceptual association here is more sweeping than that. We have been carefully placed in a state park, albeit with little mention of nature other than the humans. In a grand underscoring for a poem that attends so closely to pairings and endings, the message is strong—that one man grows and develops in the natural act of copulation with another.
– The Editors
