Pesach silkscarf

I made this 6 foot silk scarf for Neil's mum in Scotland. I don't think she liked it as she never wore it. So eventually I asked Neil to bring it back so I could document it as I had no photos of it. This was a collaged color xerox, you can see the pieces. So it's a placeholder. Before the invention of digital cameras, documenting silk art was a nightmare as you had to find a way to get the entire piece in focus. in once shot and not be blurry. I found the color xerox at Krishna Copy on Telegraph to do the best job. But then there was no way to xerox anything wider than 8.5 inches, and the scarf was wider than 9 inches.

Flower: silk painting (art) 1998

 I couldn't get decent photos of my silk pieces, and digital cameras hadn't yet been invented, so I color-xeroxed my art. A precursor to the digital camera! I used embroidery hoops to hold the silk in place, and then removed the hoop when I was done painting. It was the only solution at the time as the Chinese metal hoops hadn't yet been invented.

THE LAST OF HIS CLAN

The voice moved up the hill, 

the woman, crying. 

When grandfather died, 

all week long it went on. 

We got used to it. 

All around his bed, 

the birds, singing, singing. 

Old Donaugh Sullivan Beir, 

he was the last of the clan 

before the English came.

No date, no clue other than it was written in my fancy day planner, with notes about Bob Hass’s 20th century pleasures. Which doesn’t help because it was published in 1997, and I didn’t write that essay until 1998. Most of these poems in this journal are from 1979 to 1983. I was devastated when I lost that planner, it was one of those tasty refillable ones with small binder clips so you could move stuff around.

MAKING RAINBOWS

I tell the kids sitting in a darkened room
Yellow is a narrow band of sunlight
Green and cyan are the dream of the ocean
Magenta, nearly invisible, a fugitive
bleeds into red, you can’t tell where one stops
And the other begins. It bends back toward the light.
Purple and indigo are somewhere far beyond the sea.
On the distant borders of sight.
The tail of indigo is always the longest,
But it’s hardest to see where it ends.
RGB Always wants to make music of the spheres.
But cyan and blue are transitional
a mercurial folding into the tail, like a comet.
Of course they can be distorted by angle and light.
Prisms and crystals also control the shapes.
I throw banded light across the room with the prism.
My crystal wine glass also creates gorgeous patterns
almost dendritic, with ridges and curve of lens.
Jackson, a kindergartner asked if I was a magician
because I threw light across the room onto the walls.
Cody thought taste came from taste bugs.

10/22/98
Higham Family School
rev. 6/00

LABOR DAY WEEKEND AT THE OLD BRICK KILN

Labor Day weekend at the old brick kiln, at Remillard’s, or El Quijote.

The Gitano sings No puedo ir in the old brick kiln.
His face wrapped in tragedy, is almost comic,

but his voice travels, wrapping itself snakelike 

through sensuous bends and crenellations 

of the old brick kiln chambers where, as kids 

we used to sneak in to play in the thick dust.
The flamenco dancer’s hands speak to the night

wrapped in triste, and  la vida es el muerte.
He is plucking syllables from the air

and his pelvis pounds out the consonants. 

Vowels escaping on the outbreath, 

and the stars convulse into tears 

caught in the night’s dark throat. 

Desire wears the face of a dancer. 

The old brick kiln where we once explored, 

was rubble and spiders, for nearly a century,

it rose and fell under Jupiters neglectful influence, 

and fell again under Mercury retrograde.
After the flamenco set, Herman, Verona and I dance 

and sweat under the stars, on the roof 

of what was once an honest building,

now filled with earth-shattering disco 

to end this summer. Killing Me Softly

brought me back to Amsterdam, last summer,

and all the men killing me softly with their songs.

The disco ball drops, scattering stars onto the bay.

29 Aug, Larkspur Landing/San Quentin

Ego dancing

Down at the lake my equilibrium is restored by watching the wild geese swim towards the sunset. Preternatural fall is in the air. The geese fly back towards the darkness that is east. I am drunk on light, or is it the glass of wine? I've packed all my things, I'm ready to go. I need to finish up with a few household chores, defrost the fridge, back up my email. I fix the hem on his new pants, iron the tux shirt, take a shower. It feels good to wrap up the loose ends. Drawing the runes gives me courage... He's late, home from school, and I'm down at the lake avoiding him. How our egos dance!

HALO

The lovers entwine, 

the geese bond in pairs, 

my truck and I, 

an unlikely couple. 

It’s magical when the lights 

around Lake Merritt 

ring the lake 

like a freeform halo.

 9/9/98

Omagh Bombing part 3

He sleeps, depression stilling the heart, better than digitalis. I keep flowers to paint the tongue of the eye. Bris mo chroidhe, to break the heart, at the chance of happiness, shrapnel in the heart: self defeat at the hands of pessimism and confessionals, as if one's deepest fears were indeed the truth.

"O'Neil, a name more in pride than to be called Cesar." – Sir George Carew Elizabeth's foreman, foundered in a Munster bog.

Brave Hugh who fought with my ancestors at the battle of Kinsale in 1604, the Earl of Tyrone and Sean the Proud living beyond the Pale, tormenting Elizabeth.

The wild Rose is the one that has no thorns, but it has no need to draw blood to color its petals. What can ease our tribal pain? Disappearance and death is our inheritance. Europe absorbed the Flight of the Earls. What tongue survives the O'Neills of Seville ? Don Juan, or Sean. Unconscious tally stick carried into exile, into battle, about the necks of our ancestors.

So much pain suffered at the hands of a culture older than Greece or Rome, vanished without a trace. English legislation and diseased potatoes banished a tongue. Say the syllables of your own name in the ancestral tongue. See how it caresses you like a lover? But to use it as a weapon against the oppression—that's the final rub.

Greet me in the old tongue, if you can. In the lost syllables of an ancient order, and the rogue words for which the English could find no substitute, no sychophant. Say glamour, say tawny, say iron, keep the old tongue alive in my mouth, sweet kisses devouring speech that even the cock gives voice to in the night, not of the denial of love, surely one of the unwritten sins, but of loves speech, the integrity of whose tongue in my mouth?

OMAGH BOMBING

OMAGH BOMBING

Am I a traitor to my race,
I drink Scots whisky.

and contemplate the half-life of The Troubles 

when the Plantation of Ulster's shame grew.

And the bones in that rough field 

sprouted another generation of hatred. 

We read about Omah in the papers

how the bombs dissected limbs of the innocent
and rearranged them into Daliesque clocks 

dripping from hedgerows and curbs. 

The Afghans have a saying:

I have never known sorrow, 

no it is a field I have inherited,
and I till it anew.

Meanwhile the disappeared in Africa 

have settled home into the earth's bosom,
without a trace. No witnesses. Meanwhile,
in the Gulf, we retaliate, I learn from the news,
a new word, preemptive, as in preemptive strike.

Death is death is death. Are we at war again?

And Omagh. Neil frets, his cousins 

will surely know some of the dead. 

I went to buy film at that shopping center, he said. 

This man who shares my food 

broke down and cried. As I held him, 

I told him tonight that I loved him. 

And already he's making plans of escape, 

as if love were a grenade 

waiting to rearrange the heart.

Today is my grandmother's birthday. 

She, who kept alive the fire within me,

Kindled the holy flame within me 

so that I would bear witness. 

The grand design continues to work
through you, she said.

I grab a book from the shelf, 

John Montague's Rough Field 

because I like the title and it reminds me 

of Seamus Heaney's collection, The Field. 

A good Irish read, I thought. That's the ticket.

Except Omagh crept from the pages.

After near nearly 30 years, we are 

recycling the violence that is Ulster.
She who kept the flame alive within me, 

a decade gone, to Tír na nÓg, or Hy Breasil,

or whereever the dead go to congregate. 

Ulster, the amber coating my glass, uisge beatha,
a Kabbalah of whispered secrets & peat fires. 

Omagh Bombing (prose) part 2

While Irish minds marvel over the Celtic inferiority complex. How much longer must we suffer? I think of Tocharian mummies 4000 years dead, in their plaids and sun tattoos, faces as familiar as kin, guarding the Silk Road.

Lately the news has been ladened with images of Ulster men and references to World War I, the Battle of the Somme. Or am I newly sensitized, how do I desensitize myself to it for the cosmic links and the laws of averages.

But the words Colrane, and the Foyle have a different attack on my psyche.

Neil is playing the Protestant priest in Frank McGuinnes's play, Behold the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. He is playing against type.

At the end they all put on their orange sashes, I didn't know what it signified, but it made me shudder anyway. O'Donnell Abu was the name of the song, we never called it the Old Orange Flute. It wasn't until I stood in Leiden looking upon the statue of King Billy, or William of Orange, that the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.

In late spring we used to suck on the oat grass joints, sweet with sap, piggyback thistles and oats from Europe, Spain and Scotland, non-native species. Always I've lived a life of identifying what belongs where, acutely aware that I'm a long way from the land of my ancestors.

I am Irish when it pleases them, or I am American when it pleases them. Yank. No one asks what pleases me. The blood of my ancestors, or the land of my birth, as if one annotated the other.

So what of those who came to Ulster? Are they Scots or Irish? Where does bloodline leave off, and nationality begin? And why is it so horrific? 

Neil chastises me for drinking his whisky, is if I'd asked for something unattainable, like his heart. I’m offended. The thornless magenta rose I planted is about to bloom and already he is asking me to leave. The potatoes have yet to be harvested, and he is asking me to leave because I might get too close.

Tobar is Irish for the well, the sacred spring. I drink sacred water uisce beatha. In every language, it is the water of life. Mea maxima culpa.

The summer fog lifts long enough to reveal the turquoise jewel of the bay and it resonates against the flame trees on Bay Street, and the rust red of the Golden Gate Bridge. The straits of Chrysopylae shimmer like molten gold.

Yes, this city is the city of judgment, the judgment of Paris, an apple in the lap of California on this 150th anniversary of the Gold Rush. Gold flakes in a bottle, a souvenir from the feather River, where I toiled for pieces of the sun. And put them in the vial.

Omagh Bombing (prose) part 1

Omagh Bombing

20 August, my grandmother's birthday.

As if a traitor to my race, I drink scotch whisky, the half-life of the Troubles, when the Plantation, and Ulster's shame, grew restive, and the bones sewn in that rough field, sprouted another generation of hatred.

As we read about Omagh and how the bombs dissected the limits of innocent children into Daliesque clocks dripping from hedgerows and curbs. The Afghans have a saying: I have never known so much sorrow. Now it is a field I have inherited, and I till it.

Meanwhile the bodies of the dead in Africa settled home into the earth's bosom. We retaliate. I learn from the news the meaning of pre-emptive strike. Are we at war again?

 And Omagh. Neil frets. His cousins surely know some of the dead. I went to buy film at that shopping center, one survivor said. This O'Neill who shares my food, I told him tonight that I love him and already he is making plans of escape, as if love were a grenade, ready to rearrange the heart.

Today is my grandmother's birthday. She, who kept alive the fire in me, kindled like the holy flame of Rome within me so that I would bear witness.

The grand design continues to work through me, and at random, I grab a book from the shelf, John Montegue's Rough Field, because I liked the title and it reminded me of Seamus Heaney's The Field. A good Irish read, I thought, except Omagh crept in from the pages anew after 30 years, recycling the violence that is Ulster.

She, who kept the flame alive within me, a decade gone, Tír na nÓg, or to Hy Breasil, or whatever the place where the dead congregate.

The amber coating of uisce beatha and the whispering secrets of extinguish peat fires. Neil is fresh back from the Highlands, but he bade me promise that if he died soon, to carry his ashes to Iona, Colum Cille's Isle.

Neil's middle name is Columba, but no doves rested on his breast, Neil's namesake. A name that spans the father's and the clan's name. Neil's name repeats itself, a starter in history, a chieftain son, born in Scotland because St. Columba turned his back on Ireland.

Neil's father worked the land of his ancestors, Tír Eoghan, Tyrone, Omagh and Strabawn. Where does one poem get begin and another in? Neil chastises me for not writing. This past year have I been in purgatory for loving an O'Neill? But as Montague says, one must begin at home.

Violence blossoms in Africa, and Ireland, and now the Sudan and Afghanistan. What fields have we inherited beneath this vast sky? The worst bombing in 30 years. Kate Perry email us a chain letter condemning the violence.

A friend once misheard the word violence and thought of violins playing. I saw gangsters toting violin cases.

The Rough Field, an garbh achaidh. Should I be drinking Bushmills? A Protestant whiskey? Hugh O'Neill sleep sound in his bed.

Lamb dearg abu, the knife slipped and my left hand, red with the blood. The Red Hand of Ulster? I crossed myself, out of habit and think of the poetry plumping in the garden end Tyge buried in John's name. The Catholic slur. I learned well at my grandmother's knee. She gave me the Cailleach's skeleton one Halloween, Samhain and burned the candles.

My grandmother dabbing uisce beatha behind her ears like a rare Arabian perfume.

Carmel Pine Cone art reviews, The Pat Wall Gallery, Dec. 13, 1946

While I was searching for information on the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery in Carmel & Monterey, during the 1940s (there isn’t much), I stumbled across a treasure trove of art reviews and articles written by several writers from the Carmel Pine Cone—located in the Internet Archives. The full artist interviews are posted as separate entries, all posted on Aug. 11, 1989, to keep them together with my Pat Wall stories.

These pieces are fillers. Pieces I cleaned up to see if there was anything I could glean Because they’re form an OCR scanned newspaper archive, the text was a mess: columns were combined, chunks of text went missing, there was mysterious orphaned text, and strings of illegible clusters of consonants. And most headlines were lost. But I cleaned the pieces up as best I could and restored them to printed realm. I am posting them here along with my Pat Wall stories, for context. I have used snippets of them elsewhere in my Pat Wall stories but here they are in their archival entirety—cleaned up, of course! There were several arts articles in this issue, it was probably the last issue of the year, published on Friday the 13th!

I wonder if the Carmel Pine Cone was underwritten by Carl and Jeanne Cherry? The Cherry Foundation underwrote most of the arts events in Carmel. Carl had invented the blind rivet which revolutionized the airplane and shipbuilding industries. They were true patrons of the arts. I posted Rosalind Sharpe’s interview and about her, Jeanne D’Orge, and I constructed a biography, gleaned from several sources. 

I love the gossipyness of the columns, and the lists of names, it was a veritable who’s who about town. It is probably the first time that these articles have seen the light since 1946 (other than when they were scanned for the Internet Archives, where they are virtually unreadable). —Maureen Hurley, Vernal Equinox, 2021

Carmel Pine Cone 1946-12-13
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1946
At Pat Wall Gallery

Although the crowd was smaller than usual at the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery Tuesday night show, a lot of people flowed in for a look at the paintings and the inevitable visit to the sherry table (this time in a big bed of ice) after the Guiomar Novaez concert. Among those present during the course of a stimulating evening of conversation, dancing and music, were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Ricketts, Webster Street, Dr. Eric Berne, Muriel Rukeyser, Mr. and Mrs. Bud Foster, Gretchen Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Lofton, Philip Pinner, Mr. and Mrs. James Hopper, Henry Meade Williams, Jean Varda, Mr. and Mrs. Ellwood Graham, Remo Scardigli,' John Roberts, Angus MacDougal, Mrs. Phil Nesbitt, Rosalind Sharpe, Abel Warshawsky, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. William Fassett, Mrs. Hilda Duarte Brown, Joseph Shoeninger, Sally Fry, Marjorie Warren, Roger Johnson, and many others.

New group show in the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey

By NANCY LOFTON

The new group show in the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey is notable for color that jumps at you when you enter the door. The majority of the pictures are painted in a high, bright key which combines with the color of the gallery to produce an almost strident effect. Barbara Stevenson’s Green House is a notable exception. In this canvas, Miss Stevenson paints with solidity and seriousness, and her tones of blue and green and gray produce an effect of balance and maturity. Her canvas makes most of the other pictures in the show seem lacking in depth.

Joan Hinchman’s Boat in the back of the gallery has pleasing movement and textural quality, and Ellwood Graham’s Retrospect makes a graph-like curve into an interesting pattern.

The show includes canvases by Philip Pinner, Barbara Stevenson, Itogaway, Andre Moreau, George Harris, Ellwood Graham, Lilick Schatz, Dan Harris, Margaret Peterson, Alfred Morano, Joan Hinchman, and Jean Varda. 

The jewelry by Filippa Brooks, also on display, is original and subtle in coloring, and Pete Macchiarini’s pieces use modern lines and forms to good advantage. There’s a ring set with gold-flecked quartz that’s very beautiful. 

(It doesn’t seem to have an ending).