But was it a waste, all the hours spent in the black night at Portuguese Bend, looking for but only imagining a scene like Lundmark’s and waiting for whether the dawn or I would break first? Dawn from a circular rhythm like wave break, or me from the freezing air outside my body, the freezing gloom inside my head? Lundmark’s waves are as unsettled as I remembered feeling. Trying to calm myself, I instead imagined myself as water careening against the base of the whale-shaped cliff. A place named for the fishermen who’d launch longboats to hunt California gray whales, harpoons and lines at the ready, waiting to replace the smells of brine and kelp with salt mixed with blood. Metal sheen on Lundmark’s ocean, almost gunmetal grey. A tone which reminds me of Rick’s line to Ilsa in Casablanca about their last day in Paris. “I remember every detail. The Germans wore grey; you wore blue.”¹ Longing mixed with impending doom. Waves’ foam never breaching white as it does in moonlight but staying tinged with cobalt introspection. Both Lundmark’s scene and Palos Verdes look onto the open sea, as much for the yearning to drift out, to leave, as what might wash in unbidden. What message or revelation to clack with the tide between smooth stones, in a bottle that hopefully might not shatter on impact but roll gently and come to rest, moonlight gleaming off its surface? Something bottled instead of feeling like I was bottled. Wanting to let the current carry me and forget everything else until there was only the sea and glass and finally the sea.

*Title above is from John Ashbery’s poem “The System” in his collection Three Poems (Viking Press, 1972).

Symphony of Night (1941) by Leon Lundmark²
Image courtesy of GHS Art Collection, Inc.³

Poet’s Note

Between 1919 and 1956, the outgoing senior class of Gardena High School selected, raised the money for, and acquired one or two paintings by California artists to gift to the school. This collection became “widely acknowledged as an important collection of early California art” (Susan M. Anderson, in her Preface to the book Gifted: Collecting the Art of California at Gardena High School 1919-1956). Leon Lundmark’s Symphony of Night was gifted to the school in Summer, 1941. Lundmark studied art in his native Sweden and eventually settled in Altadena, California. He completed Symphony of Night in 1941, the year before he died. World War II was in full swing, with events in favor of the Axis powers. The dark, turbulent state of the world may in turn have been conveyed in the painting.

Jonathan Yungkans

listens to the pouring Southern California rain well in the wee hours of what some call morning and others some mild form of insanity and types while watching a large skunk meander under the foundation of a century-old house. He is thankful when his writing is less noxious than that jittery creature on the other side of those floorboards. During what some choose to call normal hours, he works as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee while finding time for the occasional deep breath.

His poems have appeared in Book of Matches, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, Unbroken Journal, West Texas Literary Review, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Only a Poodle Separates This Life From the Next, a prose poem by Jonathan Yungkans in Issue 20 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (15 September 2023); nominated for the anthology Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ A Quartet of Prose Poems: “Answering Neruda” by Yungkans in Issue 17 of MacQ (29 January 2023)

⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, in Issue 15 of MacQ (September 2022)

⚡ Le fils de l’homme, ekphrastic poem by Yungkans in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for the anthology Best Spiritual Literature 2023

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus commentary by Yungkans on the poems and on the form, in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine by Yungkans in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)