Hendry's Beach, Santa Barbara
Vast centerless its frilled borders
beating land salt-laver and seal pasture
what nightmare forged the lobster's face the spectral
man-o-war floating in its poisons wellspring of fishes
the spiked and many-armed mussel dogfish mackerel skate
endless cycles wheeling like gulls and out crawls
the walrus the horseshoe crab lulled in its pelagic dance
what horrors what chasms where the light dies
sunken forests mountains world-girdler once-God
drop of dew from time's beginning drying
on a spiraled arm of stars we stand and look out homesick
appalled here at the blue gates the land's unraveling end
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Spring Feature 2014
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Feature
- Kurt Brown A Photo Tribute
- Kurt Brown Excerpts from his "Notebook"
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Poetry
- Laure-Anne Bosselaar
- Lee Briccetti
- Wyn Cooper
- Stephen Dunn
- Richard Garcia
- Janlori Goldman
- Andrey Gritsman
- Kamiko Hahn
- Steve Huff
- Meg Kearney
- Eugenia Leigh
- Thomas Lux
- Laura McCullough
- Christopher Merrill
- Kamilah Aisha Moon
- Martha Rhodes
- David Rothman
- Harold Schechter
- Charles Simic
- Tree Swenson
- Charles Harper Webb
- Marty Williams
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Essay
- David RigsbeeOn Kurt Brown, An Appreciation
Feature > Poetry
I like this quietly stuttering poem very much, but it also has personal associations for me. Hendry's Beach, in Santa Barbara, was a place Kurt and Laure-Anne took us to see the last time we saw Kurt, in October 2013. They'd just moved to California from New York a year or so before. They drove across country in an RV filled with most of their belongings. For several hours, they drove head on into a sandstorm. They were "homesick" and "appalled," but they were beginning again "at the blue gates—the land's unraveling end." By the time my wife and I were in Santa Barbara, Kurt had planted a small orchard behind their house. I miss him. I loved him. He was my friend.