Dan Gerber: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Dan Gerber

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Dan Gerber

Three Poems

After a Long Time Away

He came to a place so far from the sea,

no one knew what an oar was for, where

no rudder had ever come about, and

no one had dreamed of embarking.

A hardwood oar, ash, the kind a slave might

have pulled, in the hull of a Roman galley,

he carried for protection and to salve his

separation from the sea. He dug

a small hole to plant the oar, its high-flown blade

dividing the sun and wind into

shadow and the shelter of deflection, and

with no other purpose there, the oar began to

take on meanings, perhaps to herald a new

planet, or the tidal pull of a distant shore.

Wild Turkeys

So I thought I might be writing a poem about

our five wild turkeys, a hen and four

lanky, adolescent chicks, driven down to us

from higher foothills of the burning mountains

by the rage of last summer’s fire.

Several surprising lines and images—trust me—

came, as if by dictation, and I

took them down on several pages of super-sticky

three-inch-square Post-it notes before being

called away by the tyranny of householdry,

mind, spinning in its separation from the poem, and

when I returned, the little pad was

on the floor, the dog looking guilty,

and only one last yellow page still attached,

on which I’d written the word, quacha,

three times, hoping to capture the sound

of turkey wings feathering in for a landing

in the upper branches of the Knob Cone

pine under which I am waiting

for the dog, a retriever, to poop, with

scant hope of retrieving any essence of how

high this five-turkey poem might have flown.

Landscape Arriving

Russell Chatham, October 27, 1939—November 10, 2019

Eternity is an idea that needs a

consciousness to keep it in mind.

Landscapes have been here before us since

human perception occurred,

always somewhere behind our focus, but

never the focus itself until

fourteen seventy-three when Leonardo

first painted what has always been here,

after twenty thousand years of making art,

granting our life’s stage a life to be loved,

an eternity of not seeing our place, now

seen everywhere we let ourselves see.

Author Bio:

Dan Gerber lives in the mountains of California’s Central Coast. He has published novels, short story and nonfiction collections and ten collections of poems which have appeared in The Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry.