Lines for Robinson Jeffers at Carmel Point

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Jeffers, you flinty sympathist of granite,
poet/homilist, provincial seer
and storm-bird, let it rest. Your work is finished.
They have no use for grand abstraction here.
Though Tor House tower is a faerie eyesore
marring the suburb’s Hockneyesque regime,
all will fall. Despair is the worst evil.
You wrote it on the dark side of the beam.

Peter Kline
“Lines for Robinson Jeffers at Carmel Point” first appeared in The Antioch Review, Spring 2012.