This poem first ran in the Spring 2012 issue of The Antioch Review.

Lines for Robinson Jeffers at Carmel Point 

by Peter Kline
 

          Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
          Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
              —Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
 
Jeffers, you flinty sympathist of granite,
poet/homilist, provincial seer
and storm‑bird, let it rest. Your work is finished.
They have no use for grand abstraction here.
 
Though Tor House tower is a faerie eyesore
marring the suburb's Hockneyesque regime,
all will fall. Despair is the worst evil.
You wrote it on the dark side of the beam.

 

***

Peter Kline is the 2014-2015 Chase Lecturer of Creative Writing at Stanford University; he also teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has also been honored with fellowships from the James Merrill House and Amy Clampitt House, as well as the Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals and anthologies. He is a founding member of the music-poetry collective Nonstop Beautiful Ladies and the director of the San Francisco literary series Bazaar Writers Salon. His first collection of poems, Deviants, was published in 2013 by SFASU Press. He can be found online at http://www.peterklinepoetry.com.

© 2015 The Antioch Review