Mt Veder 1

I awaken to the conversations of two women. The finches under the bedsheet beeped and nibbled upon its edges. The women were silhouetted against the window in the morning sun* I couldn't hear what they were saying. 

I dreampt my grandmother had fallen and the weight had dropped. Her lips were blue. A piece of iron had pierced the sagging flesh of her right elbow during the night. I hold her in my arms, thus, as she held me. I can't hear what she is saying. A woman comes in as we write, apologizing because she interrupts us, and then she leaves before she tells us anything. 

Driving down Mt. Veder, the mountains before me seem like cardboard cutouts against the solid sky. A balloon having more dimension than the mountains drifts like some great beast against the sky. Hot air rises. It is a given fact. I can't shake this sleep and the deaths I dream of—deaths of those I know and the deaths of those who are strangers. There is rust everywhere. A child's water-color set is on the table. I apply shapes of color. Soon I am carefully filling pages with color and I think of Franz Mark's blue horses in the rain and Bob was saying how close to Lascaux he died.   

Our alphabet comes from the caves of Lascaux. The calligraphy of bison before the hunt. Ochre pigment. A child finding the cave. The woman asks if I always waken like thus, and I say no, and leave, wondering why is it that I don't waken like this—the brush tracking pale yellow across the white of morning. 

My notebook tumbles down a steep embankment and lands face-down on a small overhanging branch suspended six inches above the water. Carolyn says, I'm surrounded by mothers. Are you a mother? 

I take off my kimono and thongs. I place my bare feet on the lateral earth. Poison oak lovingly strokes my ankle. I hear a car coming. As I ascend the ravine, I grab my pillows, sleeping bag, kimono and shoes. I step on my white skirt and the sound of stitches giving way like rotted flesh, or like the feeling of a job well done and I think of what we do to protect this writing. 

There is so much to write about—war, phlegm on the streets, someone wretching in the next room. I think of Lebanon, the way we ignore those in pain, the aged, death. I am shivering from what I have heard. How can I write of this? I have nothing poetic to say. 

This becomes a letter to an imaginary reader and what I really want to say is locked deep in some crevass waiting for the morning sun to melt the ice. It turns to water and disappears, turns to air before I have time to drink. I hold the brush in the air, waiting for paper.

Maureen Hurley  
Napa


















 














I will never reach the end of this road that stretches like netting of fishermen who guard their harvest like fine jewels of the sea.
 
velvet darkness of an orer^door/Witif the light nwitrh nn fT*TnfWT^n.Hhe skin on my hand crawls asleep the pause between breaths a stasis lengid^ Sjavxdyk dreafi of a roan choking roe. grasping for air, i scream breaking the rattle an roy throat, the dead are krwckdng can you feel the bones of you as you turn in your samp bed
the pause between breathe in sleep-  
a stasis lengthens becomes intolerably long and I dream of fingers about my throat grappling for air like thee first sharp breath of a newborn I will never reach the end of this road/the skin of ray hand crawls off the bones as my hands guard their harvest/like Sharp bases reath of those newborn/coating the darkness that stretches like nets to the sea

The way sunlight filters through trees the leaves create diminishing glasses. At certain times you can view an eclipse, on the ground the leaves teleport the eclipsed sun's image onto the ground and you are standing upon the ground and soon hundreds of eclipses
their slow dance across the ground so many miles from our feet

A woman says every time I move, more stones fall from the rock wall
the cat greets each outstretched fingertip as if she were the sun opening each flower
The sound of wind in the trees and rustling paper synononyms as if paper had a much sharper memory
of its ancestry
the wooden fence combs the wind as it sweeps down off the hillside
the sound of wind chimes lulls me off to sleep and the bat-like drone of the tired mind is the loudest
sound of all
I can't help but think of all the ears and Lebanon under glass my skin peels before the ten fades
we work so hard for some outward symbol of where we've been like capturing an image in silver gelatin
There is so much to write about,phlegm on the streets, someone watching, wretching, urban sprawl musak the way we ignore those in pains, debris in the night reefs
Men play at the oasis while camels dip from the sky over bending palm trees while sand sculpts in frozen waves
her veil shifts in the small breeze as  the incense from the church claws clouds the alter
like the netted shallow roots of palm trees like roots of poems spread on shallow sand, men till fallow fields
yesterday we walked up the mountain/ the rocks on the path were the color of stone/ yesterday we
were close to one another we talked about government and being careful

FROM THIS CABIN the fog settles in the valley sunlight above mountains break through lake white like gods
landless, my toes want to take root in this garden/ babies pulled too early like weeds leave a sparse
ground cover  some say its all in the timing.
I went to turn the pages of this book faster than  because staying with strangers is so intimate, the eeged finches beep as we talk about why we write it is possible to become friends in a single instant
sunlight settles on fog in the valley
 mountains break through the whiteness like gods
 staying with
strangers caged finches as we talk about why we write
 it's possible to become friends in a single instant