Joan Jobe Smith is a founding editor of Pearl and Bukowski Review, and worked for seven years as a go-go girl in Southern California before receiving her BA from CSU Long Beach and her MFA from UC Irvine. For nearly a decade she enjoyed/endured a literary and platonic friendship with the extraordinary poet and writer Charles Bukowski. Her literary profile, Charles Bukowski: Epic Glottis: His Art & His Women (& me) was recently published by Silver Birch Press; and her memoir, Tales of an Ancient Go-Go Girl is forthcoming from World Parade Books. She is married to the poet Fred Voss.
Endless
Summers
Those endless summers when my son
and his buddies were too young
to drive a car, I packed as many
boy-men sardines that would fit
into my VW Bug and drove them
to the Surf Theater in Huntington Beach
to see surf movies, The Endless Summer,
Saltwater Wine and when the surf was Up,
they strapped as many surfboards as the VW
surf racks would hold and I drove them
to the Huntington Beach Pier where they
learned the poetry of the sea, sailed
aquamarine and spindrift soup
while I lay on the sand
studying for grad school exams
trying to make something of myself
and tried not to wish I were one of them
and then all the way home I listened to
their teen-aged a-b-c’s of “awesome,”
“boss” and “cool,” the salt and
sun turning their hair golden till
autumn and time to go back to school
and now my son and his buddies,
the age I was back then, their sun-streaked
hair grown-up dark while they try to make
something of themselves, come surfing now
to get back into shape and my son
brings his children now to show them
the way of the waves, those endless summers
and those sonnets of sun, sea and salt
going on and on as endless as
always.
Those endless summers when my son
and his buddies were too young
to drive a car, I packed as many
boy-men sardines that would fit
into my VW Bug and drove them
to the Surf Theater in Huntington Beach
to see surf movies, The Endless Summer,
Saltwater Wine and when the surf was Up,
they strapped as many surfboards as the VW
surf racks would hold and I drove them
to the Huntington Beach Pier where they
learned the poetry of the sea, sailed
aquamarine and spindrift soup
while I lay on the sand
studying for grad school exams
trying to make something of myself
and tried not to wish I were one of them
and then all the way home I listened to
their teen-aged a-b-c’s of “awesome,”
“boss” and “cool,” the salt and
sun turning their hair golden till
autumn and time to go back to school
and now my son and his buddies,
the age I was back then, their sun-streaked
hair grown-up dark while they try to make
something of themselves, come surfing now
to get back into shape and my son
brings his children now to show them
the way of the waves, those endless summers
and those sonnets of sun, sea and salt
going on and on as endless as
always.
© 2014
Joan Jobe Smith
Joan Jobe Smith was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the October 2014 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Joan Jobe Smith was a Featured Poet who read her poetry at the October 2014 Second Sunday Poetry Series