Eliot Schain: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

Eliot Schain

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Eliot Schain

Three Poems

WILL

The 49er nearly died pushing himself up over Donner Pass

one thick shoe after another through giving snow.

When he finally crested and smelled the West

he invented me and all the diggers who’ve come since.

One wants to give a name, like Bill or Sam—

think of armpits reeking despite the freezing cold.

We’re so small and yet we’ve changed the world

nearly as much as God.

It took him another two weeks to get down

and build his cabin near the river.

He was sweet no longer but stuck around

and now a noisy freeway passes close to where he died.

But what of those he sired? scattered up and down the state,

burning up their rubber.

It all began with putrid sweat and hardship like a brother.

THE LINGERING

In the seventies Shane loved Dexter Gordon

the cool jazz player whose sound was like warm sand

after swimming a broad cold river.

The world needed steadying

and his horn was steadying

which is why Shane asked his nearly mute but undeniably cool friend

to play saxophone at the going-away party

when Shane, along with everything else, was going away.

The friend agreed but never showed

so midway through the outdoor event

rich with artists and ex-lovers

Shane moved a shabby lawn chair into the thicket of high anise

to sit with a lit joint between his quivering fingers...

it’s still there today, as if his friend had made it,

as if he’s still out there bellowing under the eternally western sky

as we all keep disappearing, as everything keeps disappearing.

BRIEF THAW

Everett was in the parking lot of a big supermarket

in one of those corners of America that drive him crazy

just minding his own business

when some woman wearing a ridiculous t-shirt over an unruly body

pointed and called for him to look to the sky

which he did to witness a bald eagle overhead

and traced with his forefinger the rest of the bird’s flight

through its vast arc

as if he were teaching the young to understand how the white crown

white tail feathers, a black body     how such a bird plying the wind

is proof that most of us can too

if risen above the pain of being American

then Everett said Thank you Ma’am instinctively, genuinely

as if joining her for a moment in some beautiful and faraway place.

Author Bio:

Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review and Santa Monica Review, among others, as well as in a number of anthologies including America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed.  His newest collection The Distant Sound was published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and selections have been released as an album in collaboration with guitarist Harrison Flynn, available on Apple Music and Spotify.