"Santa Barbara dry": a reminiscence

Queen of the Missions church

Pierre O'Malley's red-tiled by the sea: some wateringhole
with stars or whatnot! And stranger still’s a sign saying
reason's the life of this town, for the road to the Missions
& rows of los olivos
is the one to adobe walls, too, built by masters of the Channel:
grainy bench and lavanderia both, under red-palmed heat
I saw the grape for baptism deal at a dry Spanish fountain-
just like that!

And gone with the Masters I’m first at the shiny lavanderia

where wine here isn’t any more a heady dope that runs
trickling to the Presidio ,by the cudgel & a good fat grape.
The place is a
quake leveller felt as far as Capistrano! A lime-lighted

square for lovers, too:—"¡Ay, Bernarda mina!",Padres say;
"my lips to yours are near: a twin-breasted red-eyed Queen
you'll always be”

And since she’s slung on the backs of the Chumash, & still
the adorable colour of an acorn-mashed & leached hills,
romance-mad me who's first to go through the doors
of a church
finds instead whale spine stools & kneelers of a Rancho

where presto! at the sly side-altar a portrait of a Lady’s
animistic-patriarchal face voids her sad waters out!
Sun & drink!

And a garden of Nile lilies, yucca outdoors, a ginger paradise,
lush, looking about ready to burst bloody to its toenails
And through a side-entrance (a mostly mossy wall )a grave
of notched bones,
of one Comprador in particular, at a end of a cactus lane
"I want rest" (who doesn’t!),” from skull-bones and war”,
says good-ol' Daniel Hill, who lies here with his whore,
in Santa Barbara dry