AURAL FIXATION

AURAL FIXATION
    —for Sonny Lowe

If I were a harmonica
Tell me, how would you play me?
Your sweet breath on my lips
Hard mouth on my body

12/23/1994

EATING BAMBI, OR GROWING UP REDNECK

EATING BAMBI, OR GROWING UP REDNECK

                                     for Bill Dinsmore,   1933-1994,

                                                                              Maureen Reilly, 1932-1994,

                                                                             & Joseph Hurley, 1926-1993.

Several ranchers drop in to pay their respects,

discuss boundaries: dairy vs. beef cattle, wild & domestic hogs,

the last buffalo, the growing herds of deer,

and who’s able to hold onto the last of the open range.

It’s a dry wake; we’re all second- or third-degree Celts—

the displaced white indians of Europe who still can’t hold our liquor.

Someone asks how my uncle died. Closing familial ranks,

my cousin Sinead and I echo, “Alcohol.” We don’t add

how her father drowned in his own bed.

The Gallagher brothers take turns slaking their terrible thirst

at the Rancho Nicasio bar across the town square—if you can call it that—

drinking in the geographic isolation and psychic distance

of several lifelines with measured precision.

Here, we’re all related to someone or another by blood or marriage.

When winter grass circles the outcroppings, it could be Ireland.

We hold onto our “R”s, aspirate “S” into sh. Hold our liquor by the ears.

One rancher wears a “Native Sons of Nicasio” emblem on his jacket.

No one can explain why we locals pronounce it “Nicashio.”

To tell the natives from the newcomers, Mrs. Farley volunteers.

I’m not satisfied with dialectic explanations.

What did  Chief Marin and Nicasius call this place?

When newcomers arrive in the country of death,

what do they speak? Irish? Miwok? Slainte Gael macushla mo chroidhe.

A toast to my Gaelic heart’s blood. I keep a Joycean rendezvous

with the dead in Nicasio, the geographic epicenter of Marin.

Last month, during my mother’s wake, a forest fire broke out,

helicopters dragged tarps of reservoir water for the parched trees.

Last week my uncle’s roomate’s heart failed him.

Last night Alan McIsaac’s mother died; they gather knee-deep at the bar

after mass. His father invites me over, but I’ve another death to attend to.

(Once I was 16, kissing Alan, cattle tongued the steep hillsides.)

Sinead asks what happened to the last buffalo at the church pasture.

Shot, someone volunteers. A neighbor bought another buffalo

named it “Nickel” who mouthed french bread cigars like Churchill.

Lonesome, he took off overland, looking for ghost kin.

The venial abstraction of fences didn’t stop him.

Someone talks about goin’ huntin’, dropping his “G”s.

The speculum of potential opens us up, pushes us back to root origins,

we revert to generational patterns—the good old boys

who paid regards to Bambi on the plate and in the pasture.

I remember my uncle bringing home haunches of roadkill venison.

The newcomers close ranks, carving our land into prime estates.

We’ve killed off all the predators, and the herds suffer.

Somewhere on the plains a white buffalo calf is born.

This is the seventh and final generation before the millennium.

The wooden Indian at the Ranch House, silent as smoke.

Last full moon before the solstice:

The DUI brothers hitch home alone at dusk.

A slow driver cramps my style, the spiral of Petaluma hill

unwinds in low gear like a yellow ribbon, taking no prisoners.

I dreamed of a fork in the road, my truck leaked hydraulic fluid,

and of the final cry of a wild goose who died in my arms

as I wailed in sorrow—for he was my father come to warn me.

An owl banks its wings against the velocity of my car.

Doesn’t quite cross my path. I shudder, dismissing superstition.

Sinead says, All things come in threes. Prime numbers offer little solace.

Her father chose the week after his friend’s passing,

my mother, the seventh year after our grandmother’s burial,

my father chose the day after his own birth.

At least today isn’t Thursday; they died on a Thursday

like the exiled poet, the Paris rain quenching his bones.

Backbone of the drought broken after a half-life of thirsty skies.

The dream decodes itself: the brakes fail after I arrive home.

It’s been that kind of day, that kind of winter, keeping score, the river rising.

Maybe we could abolish Thursdays, but not the rain.

We’re the last ones, displaced by those who’ve come,

and those who’ve died; the gap closing in on each of us,

a double helix of owl feathers fluxing the laden wind.

12/19/94

Around Forestville, Sonoma West Times, Maureen Hurley Honorable Mention

Uniting the World Through Poetry:The feast of words consumed: intro for the African poetry edition, vol. 2, no. 4

THE FEAST OF WORDS CONSUMED vol. 2, #4, 1993
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
        —Muriel Rukeyser

It is no longer news that Africa suffers from go-political, ecological, and cultural neglect. Or that of UNESCO's 15 top endangered World Heritage sites with "outstanding universal value to mankind," six are located in Africa. This continent whose writers are imprisoned for acts of terrorism, in South African poet Breyten Breytenbach's terms, is a country "doomed to extinction…gobbled up by the sands of silence—and for the second time. The first time there was the black silence of shame about slavery, now it is the indifferent silence of an unavowed real-politik." He writes: "The feast of words has been consumed/ No one is guilty of innocence." But the poems offered here embody hope & a steadfast faith in Africa's future.

It is said that exiles live in one country while dreaming of another. Africa, a country of families, ironically, is also a borderless continent of exiles where those of the Diaspora write longingly of home. Breytenbach suffers from "an incurable nostalgia..." where "ancient flames infest the unconscious... images scald the eyelids." Like Breytenbach who was nine-years imprisoned, poets whose work is featured here were/are also political prisoners: Abellatif Laâbi of Morocco, Jack Mapanje of Malawi, and Muhammed Afifi Matar of Egypt, to name a few.

Mapanje asks us, "Is it worth assembling another voice?" Paul Dakeyo of Cameroon replies, "Let my breath/ rise from the deepest of dark carth/ upright words/ with only clear vocals/ of my rebellious voice." Here, the griots, the poets are calling us to action—for political commitment towards alleviating Africa's suffering. The Bantu saying, "the strength of the crocodile is water," reverberates in the depth and breadth of the voices presented here.

The noted Nigerian poct Niyi Osundare, who received the 1986 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, wrote in a recent issue of West Africa magazine: " ... there is something essentially universal about the genius of human creativity, no matter what its provenance. No part of the world has a right to lay a monopolistic claim to that genius... Africa needs to discover her own name without making other continents anonymous; she needs to find her center." Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana writes that the legacy of literature is the ability to move the human mind and spirit; a visionary world in which human creativity can overcome the persistent despair blocked by the savageries of life. Tayu Olafioye of Nigeria said, "A mother gives conscience to her child; poetry is the air with which we eat ideas." 

One can ask the age-old questions; for whom do we write, and where is the poem directed? The poet is the eye of time, the historian, the teacher, Olafioye asserts: "African poetry today... is socially conscious, using the pen as a hoe that exhumes..: and exposes... Poetry is the custodian of justice and social conscience in the face of this decadence." He asks, "What is it occupied with now? What new visions, if any, and ideologies might it have experienced lately? Each age occupies its poctry with particular regional or universal interests germane to its thinking but such a preoccupation is not exclusive..." 

Publishing is another problem: after receiving the 1990 Commonwealth Prize, Syl Cheney-Coker bemoaned the fact that in Sierra Leone, “There is no writing industry…manuscripts gather dust in cupboards." He stated Africa's governients "don't give a damn about literature or any aspects of culture.... We live in a country where a capital city hasn't a single decent bookshop or publishing house…We've joined the league of the most despicable countries because of the politics we've had in this country."

The task of gathering the poems for this anthology of African poetry was like reaching for the moon in order to plough the reflections of stars. We are grateful to all the poets who scattered their words through the universe to alight here in the temporary abode of these pages. Tanure Ojaide who single-handedly contacted many of the poets whose work appears in the Mother Earth & African Poetry issues, writes "I have tried to reach the women poets I know. The women writers tend to complain that they are overlooked or neglected." According to Chency-Coker, "The problem of female representation in African poetry is one that feminists would find interesting." In the 1990 Heinemann Book of African Poetry, (ed., Adewale Maja Pearce), out of a total of 22 poets, only three were women!

"I don't think the editor was biased in having so few women in a major anthology. Except for South Africa, few women poets are being published. Unfortunately this situation hasn't changed in the last 30 years." We delayed publication for late-arriving poems in order to include a wider representation of African women poets.

We are especially indebted to Frank Chipasula of Malawi who is the editor of the fine anthology, When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and South Africa. Frank and Stella Chipasula, who are currently editing the first ever anthology of African women poets, and their publisher Heinemann, have graciously agreed to share some of the new poems with us. Mother Tongues: the Heinemann Book of African Women Poets, will be released May 1995. Andrée Chelid writes: "Stir up that word Which does not turn away from men/ But shapes itself towards them." 

Decades ahcad of schedule, the world's population has surpassed the 50-billion mark—a line of people stacked head-over-heels to the moon and back nine times. If the words of these poems were people, would there be enough to reach to the moon? Or beyond! Poems, the moon's children, calling us to arns. Once I dreamed I walked barefoot on African earth. Geographically and culturally diverse Africa, the cradle of civilization, torn and plundered by colonialism, war, and strife, still manages to kep the oral tradition of poetry central to every private and public function of life. May this feast of words consume us.

Maureen Hurley, Co-Editor
Uniting the World Through Poetry

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L' Are Musiol, Tchikaya U Tam'si, Congo Republic Al-Ahran Weekley, Egypt 1991
Al-Kamel, Union of Palestine Writers, 1984
Bird Black South African Poetry
Black & White in Love, Mbella Sonne Dipoko, Heinemann 1982
Of Chameleons & Gods, Jock Mopanje, Helnemann
Dreamseeker on a Divining Chain, Okinba Launko, Kraft Books, Nigeria 1992
The Eye of the Earth, Niyi Osundare, Heinemann, Nigeria 1986
Familiar Ground, I. de Cox, Raven Press, South Africa

The Graveyard also has Teeth, Syl Cheney-Coker, Sierra Leone

COMMUNITY LIFE, Honors, Maureen Hurley, Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, Press Democrat,

COMMUNITY LIFE, Honors, Maureen Hurley, Press Democrat

November 27, 1994 | Press Democrat, The (Santa Rosa, CA)
Page: D5 | Section: FEATURES | Column: Community Life 

Honorable mention for poem

Maureen Hurley of Forestville earned an honorable mention with her poem ``Horseflesh'' in the 1994 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award competition for poems on the Jewish Experience, a nationwide event.

Winning poems will be read Thursday in Berkeley. The competition was established in 1986 by the Magnes Museum and the children of Anna Davidson Rosenberg, who came to California at the turn of the century and became a volunteer community leader.

The free public readings will begin at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Cody's Books, 2408 Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley.

SAMHAIN OR HALLOWE'EN

—in dreams begins responsibility. Old Play 

In the days of old in Eire (Ireland) men and fairyfolk inhabited the same earthly plane. A god of love, Angus Og was of beautiful appearance, a tall, red-haired handsome warrior king; four birds representing his kisses always hovered over his head. His kingdom was in Brugh a Boinne at New Grange by the river Boyne. One day he gravely insulted the Mórrigan or Cailleach (who was in her womanly form (Badbh)-sometimes this triple goddess appeared as a crow or an old hag think the idea of witches came from stories of her. She was the wife of Lugh, the sun god of arts and crafts).

Down by the stream, she put a dream curse upon him and gave him some cryptic advice. (Advice from the Callleach was always riddled with danger: she never lied, but her words always held trickery).

In a dream he fell sick in love for a maiden, Càer Ibormeith, daughter of Ethal Anubhail of the De Danaan of Connacht. He went out to find her (after barely winning a huge battle with her father who was helped by the Cailleach-the battle and its treachery takes up most of the story . . .) but Caer Ibormeith lived in the shape of a swan, and on the Feast of Samhain* (Oct. 31) she would be found with 150 other swans on Loch Bel Dragon. If he could identify her and she liked him (but she had vowed to forever despise the man who destroyed her father's kingdom), then, and only then he could marry her. She had a change of heart, and they did marry despite the Cailleach's curse.

*Samhain Feis na Samhna (named after a primary god) began on the eve of Oct. 31 and ended on Nov. 1) marked the end of the pastoral year and the beginning of the new year. The Celtic New Year was an intensely spiritual time, the only period when the Otherworld became visible to mankind and when spiritual forces were let loose on the human world. Gods, fairies and the dead could visit our world and we could visit their world. In Celtic countries all hearth fires were extinguished and could only be relit from a ceremonial fire lit by the druids. (Our calendar's shifted a little, Nov. 4 is now the real date for Samhain).

Christianity later made this festival into a harvest festival called St. Martin's Mass (Martinmas), All Saints, or All Hallows Day; the evening before was called Halloween- when spirits, witches and ghosts could wander and wreak mischief on the world. In Ireland my grandmother said Jack-o-lanterns were carved from large turnips (pumpkins are from the New World) and placed in every window. Evergreen plants trimmed each window holly, ivy, mistletoe). Kids dressed up in rags with masks and carried lit turnips, noisemakers and bull-roarers on long sticks made from pig's bladders to scare away the evil spirits, knocking on doors, saying the familiar Trick or Treat. If they did a good trick (sang a song, told a joke, recited a poem, or danced), & entertained the master and mistress of the house, they were then rewarded with coins and food- it was the end of the harvest season. No trick? well, no treat either!

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

I went out to the hazel wood.
Because a fire was in my head, 

And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 

And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing, 

And moth-like stars were flickering out,
dropped the berry in a stream 

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor 

I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl 

With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran 

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands, 

I will find out where she has gone, 

And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass, 

And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon, 

The golden apples of the sun.

William Butler Yeats
THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS (1899)

Green Day: Green Fuse review (end of article is missing) fan Mail from Barbara Meyn

The Sonoma County Independent • October 27 - Nov 2, 1994    P25

Keeper of the Fire: Ten years ago, poet and Santa Rosa Junior College instructor Brian Bold inherited the editorship of "Green Fuse," the county's most enduring poetry journal.

Green Day
The tiny "Green Fuse" poetry journal isn't exactly setting the world afire-or is it? By Mauren Hurley

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age. —DYLAN THOMAS

The poems found in Sonomas longest-lived literary magazine, Green Fuse, are not coyly veiled in the dusty deep-throat metaphor of academia; they explode the DNA of words onto the world, they take
to the streets, they broadcast the news in the tradition of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, who said, "It is difficult getting the news from poetry/ but men die miserably/ every day /for lack of what is found there."

It's impossible to write about the driving force behind Green Fuse without mentioning its founding editor, progressive psychologist/poet/artist Ralph Smith, who befriended many of the poets whose work appeared in his magazine.

The current editor in chief, Santa Rosa poet Brian Boldt--a Santa Rosa Junior College instructor who was a frequent contributor to Green Fuse-recalls his first meeting with Smith: "I met Ralph at the Peace and Justice Center, and the first thing he asked me was “What do you think of Ferlinghetti's work?' It was a test.

FROM THE BEGINNING, Green Fuse was a strictly grassroots affair. Smith, who founded the magazine in 1983 while in his late 70s, collected all the material often discovered by word of mouth. He typed the poems, coordinated the printing, and scheduled collating and book parties, all on a shoestring budget and with assistance from his wife, Marcia Keller-Smith, and a handful of faithful followers.

In 1988, Smith invited Boldt to become an associate editor. The following year, Boldt inherited the editorship from Smith who, dying of can-cer, wanted to ensure the magazine's continued survival. "I did three issues with Ralph and suddenly he was gone," Bold says, adding that Smith spent a significant portion of the last day of life going over the pedantic details of operating the journal he loved so much.

The biannual Green Fuse celebrates a full decade of publishing this month with issue No. 21, and the number of poets represented in each issue has jumped from approximately 35 poets to some 50. Smith envisioned bringing many Sonoma County poets and artists into the fold. The result was mostly good poetry and funky art. Under the guidance of Boldt, Green Fuse has evolved from a funky, stapled chapbook (printed on copy machines liberated from the mundane, late at night when the office was closed) to a handsomely bound 64-page format with a press run of 600 copies.

It is now more sophisticated in appearance; the upscale cover of one recent Green Fuse issue was chosen to illustrate an article on small mag. azines in the prestigious Writer's Digest. Green Fuse also is listed in several other trade magazines, including The Poet's Market and Fact Sheet Five. Bookpeople, an Oakland distributor for small presses, distributes Green Fuse nationally. The magazine is also available in Paris and London. And the poets represented are no longer limited to Sonoma County. Poets nationwide and around the world- Hungary, Costa Rica, Great Britain, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Cambodia submit over 1,000 poems a year, but the vision first set forth by Smith continues to shape the magazine

"The best poetry always surfaces," Boldt says, "and is timeless."

For many writers, Green Fuse continues to serve as a platform to voice not only environmental concerns, but currently hot political and social issues as well. According to Boldt, "Themes are not chosen, they arise." Popular themes have included land use in Costa Rica, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, Vietnam veterans' crises, the effects of logging on the spotted owl, the Gulf War. But these polemic kinds of issues often evoke diatribes, not poetry.

"Green Fuse poems are well-crafted lyrical works that also get the message across comments associate editor Marianne Ware. "Green Fuse reflects my own philosophical and political leanings. But I want to be associated with the magazine if the poems were didactic, or if the message were more important than the craft, the poem. “It’s the message in the craft working together in harmony that singles out a green fuse poem.

Says associate editor, Karen Eberhart on future trends: “I’d love to see green fruits, really get big, become a first flight rate top flight environmental poetry magazine. 

Rest of article is missing….

SIDEBAR Rest of article is missing….
Sonoma Zine Scene

THE TRADITION of publishing small literary magazines in the Bay Area exploded in the late '50s in response to the elitism of the corporate publishing world in New York, which preferred its poets dead or academic preferably both at the same time.

Poets on the West Coast got tired of waiting for New York to notice them and created hundreds of small of magazines. Some of them, like Sonoma County's Green Fuse, are enduring. It evolved as a reaction to the ecological devastation sanctioned during the Reagan-era. Others rise up like randy weeds poking through pavement, only to quickly go to seed for lack of funds or energy.

Petaluma poet  Richard Benbrook's The Tomcat, and such other fine publications as First Leaves, Grandmother Spider, Loon, Backroads, Life of Crime, Windmill, Paper Pudding, and California Oranges all are history now.  And dozens of new punk and spoken-word 'zines with prosaic names like Wyrd Zar Joose, Neurotic Girl, Bread, and First Person have emerged and died like mayflies before the frost.

Poets who want to get down to the business end of writing may submit three to five typed poems (include a self- addressed stamped envelope to the following:

AVEC c/o Cydney Chadwick, Editor, P.O. Box 1059, Penngrove
95495. Published twice a year. Tends toward "language poetry" and avant-garde French and Russian translation.

Copperfield's Literary Magazine c/o Editor, 153 Kentucky St, Petaluma 94952. Published sporadically; year-round submissions. Free at all Copperfield's bookstores.

Cyanosis c/o Darin de Stefano, Editor, 318 Mendocino Ave., Suite 30, Santa Rosa 95401. Published very sporadically.

Green Fuse c/o Brian Boldt, Editor, 3365 Holland Drive, Santa Rosa 95404. $5 an issue (includes postage). Published twice a year. Submit poems by Jan. 15 and July 15.

Mother Earth Journal c/o Maureen Hurley, National Poetry Association …

Rest of article is missing…. Also Brian wrote a nasty letter to the editor because I mentioned Kay Ryan.

MIA Sonoma Mandala & Tight

TO A NEIGHBOR

TO A NEIGHBOR

                  Je pense donc je suis

                   —Descartes, 1637

                       For Sonny Lowe

Because of your small son we find ourselves

inducted, offering meals at the rude altar.

Within his frenzied orbit we find ourselves

trading dishes across the truce of doorways,

sharing intimacies, bartering the intangible.

Coming home from the niteclubs,

at the changing of the guard, you slip

into the evacuated shroud of my body heat:

in this way we learn the odor of each other’s skin.

On the clothesline, garments whip small plots

of insurrection against the approaching storm.

I saw you with the wounded face of a stranger

test the loneliness of granite. Bluesman or poet:

we each have a vested interest in the art of suffering.

The cats crave the simple praise of hands before they’ll eat.

To hold what is good also requires merciless attention.

On the anniversary of my grandmother’s death

I learned the name of my mother’s death; took refuge

in the ordinary: a boy carving pumpkins, the tv’s baleful stare.

Not the lump in my breast, or the generational patterns

we belabored and distrusted.  The mirror of the son in your eyes.

What truth faced my father (like yours) who raised

another jar against the darkness until it swallowed him?

Over coffee, laundered secrets struggle against

daylight like young birds, or new-born planets—

The juxtaposition of distance against the kenning,

the knowing; the fatal separation of mind and body:

I suffer, therefore I am has kept so many of us safe for years—

The cup of coffee, a fragrant vessel across the River Styx.

Death eats my mother’s bones until they shine 

with the purity of snow while we gather stones

to build walls against the coming of winter,

no longer able to shrug off the inevitable—

the genetic cloth of familial patterns

unravels us with the same mistakes.

Early warning signals do not efface the reflection

of your son’s eyes against the mirrored river.

None of us chooses family, neighbors, or love.

Despite everything, like death, the spectacle

of hope persists, colors everything we do.

10/24/94  

Russian River Writers' Guild Maureen Hurley & Jorge Lujan

CPITS award

no date 1993? 1995?

HEALING WAYS freewrite

For those who will follow.
        —for Al Hunter

I wanted the edge of the equator

where the scent of eucalyptus

tangles the continents

I fell hard against the sun

on the streets of Quito

on the street of the upright coffins

I wanted to find a dancing partner

I wanted to find life

edged in the purple satin of the dead

I could see their faces smiling at me

following me into my dreams

When I saw the eyes of the unborn

I was separated from myself

though the rainbows chased us to Otovalo.

My grandmother follows me even in sleep

in the underbelly of this continent

She refuses to speak but asks for

the camera lens of my eye

to record the tarnished silver of the heart

my beating heart with clipped wings

in the cage I was born into.

I dream of lizards in the woodpile

against the coming of winter

the circular haunting of life.

I cannot write of my father

whose solitary confinement

followed him even in death

raising his jar of whiskey against the darkness.

I gestate my terms of mourning

give birth to lizards and geckos

who died the day after his birth

I walk the streets of the Mission

like a bloodhound in search of unnamed quarry

of my absent father, hungry for memory

anyone’s memory

a mirror against my own emptiness

that I couldn’t foresee

the circle of the cup eternally chasing

its own beginning, its own end.

I stack wood in order to find order

flanges of wood, splinters in my blood

ordinary things speaking in tongues

In dreams I ask for explanations

He hands me a book

says, Pretty good story, huh?

This, my gift for healing

I wanted to find the edges of the cup

I wanted to slide down the white belly

for those who will follow

not of my own lineage

for I have taken back life too many times

to live a charmed life

The decisions, hard as silica pierced my heart

opened it to the vulturing wind

and genetic code fluxing the lake of memory

ancestral chain of mountains  scouring the sky.

I give you the heart of these mountains for safekeeping

they require the singing of your feet at sky level

and they will give you fragments of me

buried in the crystalline structure of quartz and fossilized bone

I have found fragments of ancient trees wishing to speak

locked in the eternity of stone

I wanted the edge of the earth to find me for once

I believed in falling off it

I was given no object to hold

nothing to pass on except the work of my life

and the ability to find the hidden lineage in everything

the circle of the cup following me white in sleep

offering me coffee to keep awake.

I want to tell you to live is to be fully wakened

to the song of the sky

against the edges of the mountains

the gift my grandmother gave me

there are no edges, no endings

the round eye of the cup

singing patterns of the equator

of our lives

in these mountains of our past

the Styrofoam cup is a poor reminder

of this final century of the millennium

its progeny on all the sacred trails

of poetry without borders.

10/14/94
Fort Mason
Al Hunter's poetry workshop, 
CPITS International Conference

INDELIBLE BLUES

INDELIBLE BLUES

I fell into another kind of blue last night

& hung with the insomnian moon

My heart was like a bird lost in flight

I drifted alone in dreamless rooms

Caught in the embrace of the blues

The tv and I can’t sleep at night

And I hardly know how to begin

Naming my affliction despite

The fact that my heart is wearing thin

I crawled into the arms of the blues

If it would fix the situation

To battle the problem from within

I’d call a bluesman in for consultation

But the music’s gotten under my skin

I’ve slipped down the throat of the blues

Sometimes I leave my door open wide

Just to hear him play a note or two

Now there’s no place left for me to hide

For the song has left my mind askew

Surrendered to the law of the blues

I’m singing the blues solo at night

My foolish heart can’t take more abuse

The problem: the cure’s worse than the bite

I’m too old for bad love—what’s the use?

The bluesman’s given me the indelible blues

Coming home in the early dawn light

10/8/94

Treasures, Helen Ingersoll, Glenn Ingersoll, CPITS, Sebastopol Times letter to the editor

 

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

       Un lungo errore in cieco laberinto.

             —Petrarch

                            To John Oliver Simon

This is just to say that enroute

to the emergency meeting I was crucially lost

in the philosophical distance over bilateral

distinctions between the left and the right

exits for MacArthur Blvd., on the Nimitz freeway

wondering why travel required the ghostly benediction

of five-star generals; the army vs the navy.

Mapless, having destroyed all evidence of you,

I toured the burnt stubble of the Oakland hills

(thinking I was south of the border),

searching for the lost gate to 680,

onramps to nuministic labyrinths spiraling me

through the umbilical treachery of tunnels and fault lines,

always away from the source—

and time unrolled like an angry fuse down Telegraph.

Yes, every cell in our bodies having changed,

I wondered what the lesson was this time,

until I walked in Tobey’s door to see you,

my azul minotaur; I found the arbitrary red lines

and blue highways on the funereal map of reprieve.

I’d dreamed of hunting with women

who made their home on these street corners

beneath the sign of the horned Artemis.

Blame it on the undercurrent ballistics of the Piscine moon.

I’ve held both ends of the thread long enough, ready

to flee the purgatorial darkness; your hooves

having scrawled treaties of abandonment in the dust—

enough to bury us—except for that

small, final harvest taken

before the fall.

Tender enemy, once we had no need of threads

or mapping codes. Once I fed you late apples,

we practiced flight beneath the carnelian moon

and the gates of the garden moved open.

Thousands of angelitos singing in the trees.

The Southern Cross offering us up

before the rising sun.

9/20-22/94 Fall Equinox
1995 Maverick, Terrapin issue

sometimes my notes are little poems all by themselves.

WINE OVER GOLD

WINE OVER GOLD

               —for Sonny Lowe

This is just to say

I got it all wrong:

it wasn’t “Love, or money.”

A friend told me to choose

“Love over gold.”

Sure, love would be nice,

but I haven’t been off the farm so long

I can’t recognize a real gold mine

in a shade tree mechanic when I see it.

Getting my truck running again

is gold enough for me.

(For starters, such technical precision it took

smashing those solenoids with crow bars—

Perhaps more appropriate material

for matters of the heart.

Or is it faith?)

Yet we drink strong wine

from the shattered glass of courage,

and daily existence threatens

to run off at the mouth with a poem—

(the chances we each foolishly take).

Is there a Murphy’s Law for love?

Maybe Jim should’ve said,

“Wine over gold…” & just left

love out of the fucking equation.

9/17/94

BLUE MOON

BLUE MOON

She said ail the knowledge
we need is in our bodies.
The planets are lining up inside or us.
The earth is a medicine bundle.

There are more natural laws
that need rediscovering
the laws of horizon, of vortices,
of our need to breathe.

The deer beneath the buckeye
don't see the carcass
of their eventual death
sleeping under the tree.  

The limestone rocks hunger
for the touch of the sea.

8/31/94
Walker Creek Ranch

I feel lucky to have found this poem, no record, no efile, nada. Makes all this scanning madness worth it. Scanning jpgs is a pain. Added 3/18

THE SONG OF PASSING TRAINS

THE SONG OF PASSING TRAINS

           Before there was language

              the dream invented itself again and again

             giving us the binding thread.

Each night trains rumble and growl 

down the Feather River Canyon

like snorting bulls, or fiery dragons.

They do not want taming, but a virgin lap will do.

Real train lights, like moveable stars, 

                                 pulse through my dreams;

my neighbor Sonny and Elvis are jammin’ after hours,

riding the long groundswell and percussion of trains

to the harmonica singing of wheels and tracks

resonating like the mouths of finest crystal;

their curved song reverberates off slate walls.

I dream we clipped the talons of captive eagles,

showed them to the children, 

                   were responsible for their hunger,

the talons making small, dark crescent moons on the floor.

Sometimes the trains are like falling houses

coming barreling down the tracks,

leaving me alone with the eagles and children

(having swallowed the abortant too late)

while the men ride into the west making sweet music.

Too much moonlight on the canyon walls.

It begins with trout and bullfrogs punctuating the darkness.

Then, the deep rumble and moan, thrum and pulse

and the extraordinary singing of wheels—

as if shy angels only practiced with each passing train.

The river answers, slumbering gold in the deeper pools.

What survives are the angry red eyes of trains

dragging us into the well of night.

Each train wails along the canyon walls

of Las Plumas del Oro, stitching them like a shroud.

I stand on the rivershore, the unceasing faith of tides

pulls blood through my body, making love

to the song of passing trains.

8/23/94

Twain, CA