Castor and Pollux

					--for Ellery

Night on the creek bank
between Inverness and Point Reyes Station.
My lights cut the silvered dark
of a three-quarter moon.
To the left, the creek slips into Tomales Bay.
To the right, the cleft of the San Andreas
climbs from the sea
into the cup of the valley.

Ahead, the stop sign and the turn toward home,
past places that for twenty years have been our markers-
the restaurant we stopped at,
the pond where we parted as lovers,
the ridge I walked along till past dusk,
feeling my way back.

These roads-
in the white and unexpected glove of midnight fog,
the drum of winter rain-
these roads give up their history
as snatches of songs on a radio
give up bits of love left unrequited
so that cresting, as I do now, the top of the ridge,
becomes all the times I've crested it-
a composite bittersweet as the black vault of air
when the lightning leaves it.

I drop down now, past the bridge at Tocaloma
and into the woods,
the wall of the valley eating Orion,
pulling the constellation of the twins through the
tops of the trees.
I will go home and try to write of these things
but I will not be able to describe the lines
that reel back behind us, you and I,
into the whole history of night
where Castor and Pollux sail over the ridgetops,
calling to each other in the dark.

This poem first appeared in Barnabe Mountain Review, December '95

© Peter Harris-Kunz, 1996

Poems by Peter Harris-Kunz

The Albany Poetry Workshop