This week's Outdoor Poet, Stephen Kessler, is a Santa Cruz-based writer who has no pets or hobbies.
Wine Country
The land is strapped down with endless lines of tightly tended vines, staked and tied in identical postures of bondage for the pleasure of epicures miles and years away who will someday sip their fruit in a restaurant with their wives or some dame they’re trying to seduce, row crops crucified near the creek bed, in the flood plain, unnaturally implanted on formerly green or golden hills where grasses smelled wet as rain or dry as summertime as you drove past on a California road. Now the whole state is grapes and they are good for business, winemakers squeezing the last drops out of the tender skins and aging them in oak or stainless steel and in the imaginations of the tasters and sommeliers whose sensitive tongues must discern not just the flavor but the poetry required to describe such subtly various shades of red, of white, of the gleam in your eyes over the rim of your glass when we toast after we’ve been apart. That’s why these liquids exist, like sacred blood, to seal our desire, which transcends flesh as we are aged in these containers that can’t contain our spirits, which keep spilling as if forever. We are reminded of each other always by these aromas as we mourn the earth and regret all that we can’t drink. How many redwoods cut add up to how many cases of contentment, how far can we go before there is nothing but wine as far as the eye can cry, because we are crying at the same time as drinking in the landscape we love as we do our bodies in these acts of communion. If wine were fire it would have consumed the forests, the valleys, the cities long since where we sit and sip in the last polite lives we’ll have before we are animals again, mating and grazing, hunting and gathering whatever’s left after the storms. Here’s to our habitat, my love, as it was before being cleared and bound and pressed to get us drunk, and as it will be when civilization is a word in some language nobody can remember.
About The Author Stephen Kessler is the author of Scratch Pegasus (poems), Poems of Consummation by Vicente Aleixandre (translation), The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (essays), and other books of poetry, prose and translation. He is the editor of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges and of the quarterly literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. Visit www.stephenkessler.com.
Photo of the author with wine glass by Juan Felipe Herrera, 1981
The Outdoor Poet is edited by Robert Sward, author of numerous books of poetry including, most recently, New and Selected Poems: 1957-2011 (Red Hen Press). He lives on the Westside with his wife, the artist Gloria Alford, and a poodle mix named Cosette. Participation in The Outdoor Poet is by invitation.
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