In California

By Donald Davie 1922–1995 Donald Davie

Chemicals ripen the citrus;

There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,

And on the shoreline

Hygiene, inhuman caution.

Beef in cellophane

Tall as giraffes,

The orange-rancher’s daughters

Crop their own groves, mistrustful.

Perpetual summer seems

Precarious on the littoral. We drive

Inland to prove

The risk we sense. At once

Winter claps-to like a shutter

High over the Ojai valley, and discloses

A double crisis,

Winter and Drought.

Ranges on mountain-ranges,

Empty, unwatered, crumbling,

Hot colours come at the eye.

It is too cold

For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit

Yellow burns on the distance.

The phantom walks

Everywhere, of intolerable heat.

At Ventucopa, elevation

Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen,

Deserted or broken settlements,

Gasoline stations closed and boarded.

By nightfall, to the snows;

And over the mile on tilted

Mile of the mountain park

The bright cars hazarded.

Source: Selected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd, 1985)

Biography

Donald Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, to George Clarke and Alice Sugden Davie, received his early education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and spent his boyhood in “the industrially ravaged landscape,” as he called it, of the West Riding. As a Northerner, he has said that in literature he grew to like “the spare and lean.” From his mother, who had a liking for poetry and knew, according to Davie, “the greater part, . . .

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