Drove to where the trees turn to ocean air and vista,
golden hills and old crag, water churning
in the far, low distances. M brought enough to microdose
and we chewed dried persimmon to help
with the aftertaste: sort of chemical but earthy.
And the elk we’d come to see watched us
in a herd, interested then not, pulling grass and chewing.
We knew to be nonthreatening. There were three of us
then four, but J passed on the mushrooms. Our keeper,
he walked between us and the rocky ledges.
This ocean, wrote Spicer, humiliating in its disguises.
We took turns talking horizon-like about love,
making up a future we could remember
or want to, careful always when we saw a calf nearby
with its mother: they’ll charge you.
As far North and South as we could see, at a pace
we could not, cliffs spilled into the Pacific
whose shimmer belonged to none of us
and each of us, in turns. Tougher than anything.
And the long moments opened around us
and the bag of persimmon rounds grew light.
Cold-air breath a familiar hurt. A stirring white from blue,
the patterned sounding. We’d all return, eventually
and alone, to our expensive rooms in the city, the ebbing
traffic of late evening on MacArthur. We’d never make it
to the far point at trail’s end, the point for which the park
is named, and where no elk were grazing.
This poem was excerpted from Waldman’s collection ATRIA: Poems. Copyright 2026 by D.S. Waldman. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.