Astonishing Thoughts

Both of these poem astonished me. The first I found on a typewritten page in a book. I do not know who wrote the poem, and a Google search produced nothing. That is strange in itself.

The second poem is by Robinson Jeffers, a remarkable man, perhaps a man for our times. The world is bigger than humans, and we are a part of the cosmos. I read that Jeffers was Bukowski’s favorite poet.

Where it would be pointless to turn back
by anonymous

The next point of reference is twenty miles off,
An ill-defined part of the horizon,
A slight rise like the one twenty miles back.
You find so much ground to pass over
That covering it quickly isn’t much help.
On the only radio station, a voice explains,
In an accent you wouldn’t have thought possible,
The most practical way of doing something
It would never have occurred to you to do.
The voice is distant and doesn’t seem aimed at you.
By now you’ve lost track of precisely
What you had in mind. You move on because
For some reason you have come here to do that,
Although what you are doing is completely
Unremarkable. You wouldn’t know to look around,
But they take this route every day; incredibly,
People far worse equipped than yourself
Did the same thing a long time ago.
You move on because somewhere up ahead,
If you remember right, if you’re going the right way,
If everything they told you was true…
There is a place called Colorado where you will,
Of course, be very glad to arrive, where the others
Wanted to go; and you will sit smug in the shade
High up on a mountain, feeling the wind
Send shivers over your body, looking back
At the great sickening swoop of the plain
And think it part of a grand design:
Satisfying, necessary, even beautiful.

Rock and Hawk
By Robinson Jeffers

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the sea-wind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

A dark peace