Year after year he composed verse of stone
in this home constructed by caring hand of ancient stone.
Both will meet their challenge by time, by an utterly different,
an utterly different time.
You can see that this life required space, the fierce elements,
the cry of hawk in the air, jealously-guarded seclusion, curtains of fog,
the ceaselessly moving body—barely a stone’s throw away—
of ocean.
I imagine Jeffers
could not have lived here much beyond his decease;
his time was up here—
The steady encroachment of streets & houses, of ever growing numbers
of unwelcome neighbors, of tourist cars,
tourist-bulging as today we find Carmel-by-the-Sea, all springing
upon his boundary gate,
the blare of money irreverently shouting at his old stoic simplicity,
all would have strangled the soul, inevitably an animal
cornered,
a caged, world-hating hawk.
Consider the stones, slabs, tiles, artifacts of the ages,
gathered from around the world, built into a poet’s fortress,
and now Tor House an artifact of its own in an utterly different,
an utterly different, New Millennium world.
But if you would cast your eyes just beyond,
as he did—
There, barely a stone’s throw away,
still, the ocean, ceaselessly moving, untamed.