Instructions for a Modest Project, Granville Redmond’s Carmel Coast, c. 1917, by Mary B. Moore

Carmel Coast, by Granville Redmond (USA) 1917, some sources 1920

Instructions for a Modest Project, 
Granville Redmond’s Carmel Coast, c. 1917.
 
Don’t strut. Muddle and meander 
the beach’s slight creases,
the one shallow gully that side-winds
toward the low V where the sea
shows. Be mauve like that channel.  
If purple, be grayer.  Yield to wind. 
The scrubby junipers lie low,
and the cypress flattens
and contorts, wind battered.
One limb crooks nearly 
90 degrees; two form 
an almost X;
and all rise and fork,
a system of W’s, Y’s,
and indecisions.  It queries,
doesn’t answer, and bows.
Let your alphabet mute
and mutate. The ice plant scrawls
whatever shapes it crawls,
blue-gray-green spatters,
little stubby fingers,
many reaching sideways.
Succulent and named for its frost-
sheen look, it’s lush not frigid,
and unrelenting. In bloom, 
the magenta flowers dazzle,
fifty or more thin petals 
fringing the yellow centers:
Fiesta if you must:
Redmond omitted their boast.
His dry runnels don’t pout;
They channel gray and tan
tinged green.
Sunset or dawn barely
pinks the clouds’ irregular
rows or wave forms,
and the marine layer 
chalks the horizon
lavender or violet:
Avoid crescendos.
If the cypress’s bent
proves wind’s violence,
its angle fits the slight
slope that lends 
it shelter. It’s brown-green, 
not viridian.
Muted isn’t moot.
 
Mary B. Moore

Mary B. Moore's recent award-winning books are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys, 2017), Flicker (Dogfish Head, 2016), and Eating the Light (Sable, 2016), selected respectively by contest judges Dorianne Laux, Carol Frost et al, and Allison Joseph. She also won the inaugural Three Sisters Award from NELLE (2019), and the second-place prize at Nimrodin 2017. Her poems appeared lately in Poetry; 32 Poems; Prairie Schooner; GeorgiaReview; Gettysburg Review; Terrain; The Ekphrastic Review; Fire and Rain, Eco-Poetry of California; The Nasty Women Poet’s Anthology; NELLE; and Birmingham Poetry Review. A native Californian, she taught English at Marshall University, has one daughter, an attorney in Northern California, and lives with her husband, a philosopher, and the cat Seamus Heaney, in Huntington West Virginia.