Kevin Cantwell: California Poets Part 11, Four Poems

Kevin Cantwell

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Kevin Cantwell

Four Poems

The Traffic of Stars Above the Palomar Mountain

Far back beneath summer’s darkened portico, I sit but no longer smoke.

Still I pat my shirt pockets for a Zippo and cigarettes to touch

those old habits and remember the long-ago, breeze-whipped cirrus of frozen breath.

Stop by stop a slow car moves through the avenues, windows down,

the horn-blats of ranchera faint from its radio. At each stuccoed house,

I now know why the driver pitches his customary plastic bags,

weighted with white landscape gravel and with a paper slip of services

offered by the Duong, the Perez, or the families Nguyen:

gutters, tree trimming, the repair of busted sprinkler heads, wayward

children scolded, exteriors painted, and even the ingenious rats

the Boyle clan with their persuasive wiles will trick

from beneath the garden shed with poisoned rinds of oranges: services humble

as that of the poet called upon to describe a California evening,

a vocation higher perhaps than the Walmart greeter who checks our bags for thievery.

Once one summer I painted a house for a hundred dollars,

which showed my slapping brush’s haplessness, young that I was then as the boys

I would one day teach in the state prison to transition them as short-time

homies to a life of metaphor; and during the brief days of a winter’s solstice week,

I squared cut graves once with a bitter crew in cold rain, the clay too wet

and the slope too steep for a skidding excavator; but what, I have wondered,

as I sat beneath the pines outside the Cal Tech facility, if I offered myself

as the next poet laureate of the Palomar Mountain Observatory,

which to that science staff might seem unlikely, although they worked

their lives to traffic in stars. I would be earnest to explain how that mega-ton disk

of cement, proxy mass poured for the mirror itself, used to test the gears

of the telescope contraption as the exact weight of that bleb, which I nearly

wept to know, turns on a sealed pool of oil to quell vibration and make an object

clear when the seeing is good on cloudless nights. How I would praise

the barrel-chested pine in the observatory yard and its snowy hours without us;

how I might compose small lines with school children in their tiny chairs

and crease them into origami folds. Such was my life-long preparation for happiness,

although their hiring might be seasonal; and neither would the one unsmiling

tradesman be of any help: he who tended the bubbling melt of gold in the lead vat

of the Little Saigon City Gold Emporium, for which his miracle

already has dibs upon it; but for my calling and my hope I thought I might prepare

my lowly application, dropping pea gravel into each Ziplock baggie

tossed onto porches, each with a few words of scrawl espousing the funerary gloom

cast by their houses onto their midnight lawns: that I might praise too

the shush of irrigation sprinklers, in whose wash I would rinse my eyes,

while even Whitman’s insomniacs slept, dousing my face of the common dirt

and, falling upon me already, the invisible silica of stars,

and what I would become to make this light.

Black Star

My tax guy Bob calls me on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m guessing

he must be lonely too. What month did we move to California

he wants to know. And then he tells me how he followed the Braves

since they were in Milwaukee and that he would listen

on the sneak from the fields where he was supposed to be

tending to the milk cows. His family, five sisters, five brothers,

counting me, he says, as if there is yet one more way

I cannot figure this out. We are four sisters and four brothers,

including me I sometimes have to remind myself,

but I tell him not the half of it, nor the leaf-blown stairwell of dusk

one by one we must now each ascend. Bob was the youngest,

his father fifty-nine when he was born, and his brother, returned

from the Eighth Air Force, was made to carry the note on the truck farm

their father had lost. The family German, he would ask at Christmas

if from those cold veils of rain they had bombed his cousins?

Because I had no answer, I said that the doubles of Hank Aaron,

and those triples, those numbers alone, would give him the black star

of an asterisk, struck as a jot that might have come from the Sumerians,

or so I have read, and so I have learned as what else not to say

for the mere shame of knowing. Still, he has told me that one

older grandson is in the wind, and that’s why at eighty-two

he has the four-year old great-grandson watching cartoons in the morning—

mom, dad in L.A., doing the fentanyl nod in chairs under the overpass,

believing they hear water where there is no water

but the traffic of night rumbling above.

Plumeria

Set outside this morning from the farmer’s market

in full sun, the plant guy telling us that spring is April

this far inland, March if we’re closer to the coast.

Besides the greenhouse work, he does fences and decks

according to his card flipped over as a price tag.

He laughs when I guess the Oklahoma in his accent,

though he was born in Santa Monica, St. John’s hospital,

his father from Ohio, his mother, the Dust Bowl.

You might need a couple of years for a bloom, he says,

and throw a bedsheet over it if they talk about frost.

Waikiki Neighborhood

I still have that fire-glazed bonsai tray I bought twenty-five years ago

from a family shop of shelved plants up a side-road from the beach.

Each spring I thought I would plant a runner from a dwarf azalea

and train it over a wedge of stone – but now I am too old to master

how wire will make a branch dip and must accept the patio I sweep

and now this rain by brushing leaves from the gutter I let water down.

Author Bio:

Kevin Cantwell’s most recent books are One Thousand Sheets of Rice Paper (2023) and Takeout Kitchen Below the Perseus Cluster: New and Selected Poems (2026). He is editing a selection of letters by the late American poet William Dickey and has been awarded the James Dickey Poetry Prize. New poems have recently appeared in Zyzzyva, Five Points, and The Hudson Review.