In celebration of the reopening of the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art—which had been damaged by flood and restored—the museum staff invited alums of Iowa’s writing programs to compose short ekphrases inspired by pieces from the permanent collection. I chose this Diebenkorn painting because I’ve often admired the open quality of his landscapes and the points at which he interrupted that openness with lines that shorten and inscribe that limitlessness with limits. As I considered the painting, I was reminded of the ways in which my childhood was a place of permissive wandering, the boundaries often determined by physical structures that would be insurmountable. As the poem grew, it both tested those boundaries and adhered to them, returning to the seawall beyond which my brother and I could not travel. This poem is about the safety of a wall as well as the waves that gradually erode that wall by pushing against it.•
OCEAN PARK
the seawall was as far as we were allowed
to travel, my brother and me
in our zodiac shorts
and matching bucket hats
the seawall, like the rim of a bowl we
couldn’t spill over the top of
ants in our pants
and star-shaped sand picked up at
the seawall gray as a thunderhead
covered in limpets and cones
sea spray and spray paint
beyond which the great pacific
the seawall broken by the waves, the waves
broken by the wall, two waifs
raised by the wind
and tiny cone-shaped shells
the seawall, our parents said,
would protect us from the sea
but who would keep us
safe from everything else not
the seawall surely not the seawall doing
all it could just to hold back
the slap of gale forces
the hand of the almighty ocean
the seawall looking out yes but not for us
This poem appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
DA Powell's books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Powell teaches at University of San Francisco.
