The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: El Porto

  • Watermarks from a Night Spring

    Embers of a partially burned ocean
    In a box in a dank basement molting notes
    A weathered surfer slowly descends the creaking

    Worn stairs, dark swells yawning
    Fish eyed and barnacle knuckled he climbs
    Finds and opens the box, peers in, smells the pages

    Runs salted fingers over the raised words
    Rusting paper clips, chiseled letters in Courier font
    Fading beached seagulls washing away in an incoming tide

    Wired spiraled journaled waves
    Bleaching across the page ink in water
    Blistering sun burnt tattoos on old shivered skin

    He can no longer read without bottled glasses
    He chuckles, the tide receding washing scouring
    White out rocks across words stuck buried in red tide pools

    Breathing with a snorkel
    The surfer leers over the smoldering sea
    Takes up the seaweed soiled waxed manuscript

    And paddles out of the basement
    Walks down to the beach and what remains
    Of the water and casts out the paper fish net

    Into a set of scaling waves
    Lit with a lustrous industrial moon
    The waves curling letters in blue neon.

    (Click any photo to view gallery)

  • Ray, 1956

    He feared drowning. He fell asleep on the bus,
    sleeping past his stop, and on down to Redondo Beach,
    the waves breaking, hard on hearing.

    He slept past the beach break at El Porto,
    his head bouncing against the beach-side window,
    his tools jiggling in his toolbox at his feet,
    past the Manhattan Beach Pier,
    the Hermosa Biltmore Hotel,
    the Hermosa pier, on down to Redondo.

    The bus driver would have to speak up.
    The evening water was glassing off,
    the Strand bars filling with surfers,
    their cream yellow and orange and blue surfboards standing
    against cars, walls, wet, dirty sand waxed.

    He dreamed of fish, bottled beer, oysters.
    He dreamed of broiled eel,
    of yellowtail garnished with scallops,
    dreams he did not understand.

    A giant squid rose from a thick gelled water
    and reached up for him, and he quick stroked
    in his sleep on the bus to dog paddle away,
    back to Shively, the house near the railroad tracks,
    where he’d built out the basement room in knotty pine.

    He awoke on the bus in Redondo Beach,
    at the end of the line, foggy out now,
    the sound of the surf muffled
    in his ears. Flying fish eggs
    surrounded his tired and dozed head,
    his hair closely cropped,
    his clothes dirty from the day’s work.
    He’d returned the car, a ’56 Plymouth,
    and salt filled his ears.

  • To the Reader Staring at a Paywall

    45th Street, El Porto, Circa 1976
    45th Street, El Porto, mid-1970’s, looking north toward El Segundo’s Standard Oil Pier.

    Behind this wall of paper lives a poem no subscription will reveal. The poem is invisible. No journal can hold this poem. There is no log-in, no fee, no access, yet the poem is free. The words spill into the paper like seawater over a levee. This poem must be imagined. Later, after the reader leaves this book-less library, a pinch of dry salt will be enough to recall this poem.

  • New Excerpt from “Penina’s Letters” at the Boulevard

    An excerpt from Chapter Six, “Light and Sculpture from a Surfboard on Santa Monica Bay,” from the novel Penina’s Letters, is now up in Issue # 5: Special Issue: Liberation, of The Boulevard, a publication of the Attic Institute.

    Related Posts: Penina’s Letters at The Boulevard. “Penina’s Letters”: Hawthorne Fellows at the Attic Institute.

  • “Penina’s Letters” at The Boulevard

    A short excerpt from Chapter Two, “The Truth of Things,” from Penina’s Letters, a novel in progress, is now up at The Boulevard, a publication of the Hawthorne Fellows at the Attic Institute: A Haven for Writers.

    Click here to read “The Truth of Things.”

    I’m a Hawthorne Fellow at the Attic Institute for the period April though August, working on a novel, Penina’s Letters. For information on the Hawthorne Fellows, click on the Attic door below. They are accepting applications now for the next Fellows period, Oct. through Feb., 2012-13.

    Related Post: “Penina’s Letters”: Hawthorne Fellows at The Attic Institute

  • Ocean Surfing Photos From the Late 1960’s

    I went outside to grab this morning’s paper and the air smelled and felt like the ocean, warm but a bit wet, a “marine layer,” the weather folks call it, and I was reminded of early June mornings in the South Bay, getting up to “go surfing,” and thought I’d pull some old photos, for an ocean surfing post.

    We’d sometimes go down to the Redondo Beach pier, a horseshoe shaped pier. The waves were never very good there, but the view from the back of the waves gives a different perspective on the surfers, here one paddling out, the other dropping down.

    Also at the Redondo, horseshoe shaped pier, this photo was taken looking south from the north end of the horseshoe.

    The last two photos above were both taken looking south from the Manhattan Beach pier.

    We peeled the fiberglass off of our longboards, reshaped them into short boards, and re-glassed them in my Dad’s garage on Mariposa.

    This is me at El Porto in September of 1969, (riding the board seen on the floor of the garage in above photo, an old Jacobs), the month before reporting for Basic Combat Training at Fort Bliss, in El Paso. Surfing is bliss.

    Here I am kicking out at Leo Carrillo, but my board has a different idea. Now I’m going to kick out of the house and go for a walk in this marine air.

    For More on Surfing, See Related Posts, Below:

    The Sea Far Away

    Jerry Lewis at the Paradise

    Hemingway surfing and writing

    Small Wave Riders 2009 annual surf trip video

    John Cage, Cowboy Surf Shop, and Garage Jazz

    Albert Camus on the Economic Collapse

    Where weather and writing merge