Maureen Hurley & Jessamyn West, Napa Poetry Conference, 1985

             Maureen Hurley & Jessamyn West, Napa Poetry Conference, ©1985 Kathleen Lynch

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. —Jessamyn West

added 4/24/2016 

Letter to Seamus Heaney (NEED HIS REPLY)

 

The red tide ate the sun (garbled text)

The red tide ate the sun Cessation, surcease
Civil war breaks out the dunes,
Opium poppies. 

And in the room.
This white splash against shadows
Afternoon solitude in the mall
Long shadows across our feet
The bottom of my shoes stick to the floor.
Rivers of heat rise from the black ribbon
Sacrosanct. 

Red hibiscus
 the size of your face and gladiolus
Funerary memories on the stock

and stained the water red
heavy breathing from within 
the shell of your ears 
I travel through meadows 
under a cloud of smoke. 
Isadora laughs as her car 
roared through the streets of Paris

This leavening inbred rises
like ghostly intuition 
loosened at night from the sea
Soft blues of flowered curtains.

 July 10, 1985

David Bromige, Paul Mariah, Allen Ginsberg, photo

This was from the Helen Luster memorial at the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa

HIGH WATER MARK

I could just see you

the day you decide what poetry is.

These things, these shapes, these flowers

a partial memory to orchestrate

an arbitrary collection,

a miracle at the end of purpose.

We are ready.

Hass says Milosz is listed in the phone book.

Look for a pattern of three instances of ambiguity.

While you were wandering

telephone poles carried countless messages

across the land.

Even the hills show marks of obscure water.

You stand lost in thought

your feet together

and the road is long.

7/85

CAMBRIAN AIR

1. I was conceived on Mt. Tamalpais,

so my mother says, but she says many things.

My aunt hints of some hidden love,

and my father briefly enters little into the picture.

This piece of Precambrian coral once buried

in alluvial mud of shallow eurekan seas

with its fossilized quartz heart

is more accessible than their stories.

2. When we made love

this free haploid DNA

climbed helical staircases

and the code of our lives unwound.

This is how the sea must have looked

to the sky when free-swimming coral

contracted its soft body & fought gravity;

now the corals are mysteriously dying

and no one knows why
the hole in the ozone layer is growing.

7/85