Keith Ekiss: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Keith Ekiss

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Keith Ekiss

Five Poems

Early California Poets

—Ina Coolbrith

In her teens still a girl she gave birth

the child died she left her husband

changed her name took a writing name

left the Smith of Joseph Smith

uncle who founded the Mormons

refused a fifth wife marriage

became a poet of California

of laurels she gathered in Sausalito

and sent to adorn the grave of Byron

became an honorary member

of the Bohemian Club and wrote

verse in the manner of Keats

she said on the wagon train west

her baby doll died and all the children

attended the funeral

in the city of elaborate dresses

for dinner and tea and bed

breakfasts were a luxury of grapefruit

Burbank named a poppy after her

she almost lived to see the bridge

which some said spoiled the view

when the fire burned it burned

her letters and the letters the fire

didn’t burn she burned herself

Songs from the Golden Gate

When the Grass Shall Cover Me

someone had to start it all

someone had to start all this singing

even as I read and know the reason

we no longer open her book

Early California Poets 

—Joaquin Miller

"It was my boy-ambition to be read beyond the brine."

Born in name a Roman senator

Cincinnatus Hiner Miller

invaded Nicaragua at the heel

of William Walker

and panned for golden rocks

planted trees the trees still stand

gave his daughter to Ina Coolbrith

and never took her back

a bearskin cape and sombrero

in the salons of the pre-Raphaelites

pawned his watch to print

Pacific Poems anonymously then a pilgrim

flowering the grave of Burns

crudity evidence of the American

equal the English said of Whitman

giving readers the bull and panorama

they'd imagined the Buffalo Bill of Poesy

his sister and elder brother died

he returned to America cared for

his mother divorced the hotel heiress

lost his money on Wall Street

and built a fine log cabin you could visit

any day in Washington, D.C.

Creeley’s Farm

I wanted to stop    wanted stillness

no names exist      for days in Bolinas

beard of monarchs       and sunlight

•

Vines brow a doorway; calla lily fronds plume by the creamery, no flower yet, still a lily. At its worst, this farmhouse stood infested with slugs and fleas, a hippie midden with spectacular seaside views, damp in winter—.

•

Bobby Louise wrote that she found scraps of fabric she imagined belonged to the old farmer’s wife, bits of church dresses, a child’s school clothes, milking patches and curtains to soften summer light. Up early, to bed late, daily living needs mending. Like Bobby Louise, she worked hard to make a place for less than grateful men.

•

“Patiently stumbling

over familiar discontent

lumbering yardbird

sings his lament.”

                        —Written on a wall in Creeley’s studio

•

Leave the windows open and the idea of house disappears. In the crotch of a gulley, a rumor of water. It’s not hard to spot invasives disfiguring a cypress. Any knot of roots is beetle ground. Wind in the trees, a sound like fire.

•

Breath pause, stumble. At the gilded colloquium, the old guard bristled when a professor suggested Creeley carried forward a Puritan inheritance. The post-modernist guessed he wrote with an erection. By all accounts the man was generous and fathered eight children. Mostly, he pared away spaces of time in which you’re invited to rest.

•

The next owners found rot and mold, a footprint to salvage; took the house apart and sent it board by board through a mill. Inside a wall, how it got there was anyone’s guess, they found the shaft of a wooden flute.

•

I’d forgotten how a spinning lighthouse beam seems to shape the wind, the way a child curls toward your neck to share warmth. The leaves on the trees all danced in the same direction. Anything not of us releases us. Not to return meant cessation of breath. I didn’t want to return.

•

My life, Bobby Louise wrote, fell apart here.

•

Somewhere in town, I’ll never find it, a man woke early and left the house before he could kiss his sons awake and hauled out nets and made his catch and now his widow teaches the children to mourn imperfectly and the beauty of the landscape only troubles the grieving.

•

It’s not far from vacation house to farmhouse, farmhouse to ranchero. This land, after all is said and done, a good fit for cows. August was the time when the elk herd was fattest. Past the Mexican colony it’s only so long before a sail cutting over the fabric of sea and the deer noticing this, startled, before placing their noses once more to the grass.

Square Deal, 1964

—after photographs by Arthur Tress

A woman’s mouth disappears into her face—

swears they’re serving in smaller cups these days.

Waiting for love, but she’ll take coffee.

He photographs a truant: What’s he doing on a school day?

and a one-eyed veteran of the dock strikes,

then takes the next model flat on his back—

That’s no way to keep a suit pressed,

who closes his eyes to better hear the music

of a public fountain. The main event

waits downtown: marchers and bullhorns,

flags and fevers. It’s Ringo for President 

or Give us Goldwater. The rage is just beginning.

Done with convention, he tries the beach:

two spinsters on a bench who let the roses moulder.

Their feet are too short to touch the sand.

One in cat’s eye glasses peers to read a Bible

the other presses open.

The Waterfall

Where the river finally

becomes air where the

bottom drops out inventing

radio static and displays

how much water has

in common with smoke

sinuous and yonic making

an argument with rocks

that never listen who wins

stay an eon and find out

a place where the river's

secret at last turns public

delivering itself into mist

Author Bio:

Keith Ekiss is the author of two collections of poetry — "Burial Fragments," co-winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize for 2024 from Gunpowder Press — and "Pima Road Notebook" (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010), a book about growing up on the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona. As a translator, his works include "The Fire’s Journey" (Tavern Books, 2019), an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio in four volumes and "Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio," published in 2016 by The Bitter Oleander Press. He is a Lecturer in English at Stanford University.