Point Bonita:
The scratchy sound of pen and white page, the drip drip of noses, and the scratchiness of the throat. Brokenhearted Sharon sighs, and I wonder how much my art piece sold for. Layer of marine haze tinged with brown, the ozone hole growing, closing in biological arithms, dedications to death, the healing power of green and the fire of magenta.
The man with the guitar surveys his handiwork in the garden. With a few cord changes, Eurydice is looking back over her shoulder where darkness sat waiting to find the center of her eye, jostling her with paradox how much we savor without knowing the sense of vision.
Mount Vision in Point Reyes with its strange helicopter pad and orange mushroom radar. Like a Stonehenge of sorts. What's strange quarry gave birth to them?
The chupping of a robin in the chaparral, such comforting sounds – the dead one on my doorstep. I guess it's time to draw the robins again.
I am a mover of small rocks. From Oaxaca, and Monte Alban, the small pottery shards fit into the. niche on the north peak of Mount St. Helena. We invent ritual. I take back five rocks and find a huge quartz crystal, my talisman.
At the big rock, with no other name, this megaliths on our hill, the Christmas day ritual, was to visit it with my grandmother. The sorrow washing over me and waves, caught between laughter and rock.
From Mount St. Helena I take volcanic red rock and leave it there, and from this place I take ouartz from the ridge outside of Guerneville. I placed both rocks in a pyramid, making a triangle. Cairns to keep me safe.
At Armstrong Woods, after my ritual, four vultures came. Three from the north and one from the south. They converged over my crude altar made of stones – I left corn and bread, cranberry juice and smoke from sage. My crystal rocks pointing north receiving instructions, the rocks I brought back from St. Helena, the one from the top of my childhood hill.
At the big rock, a bluejay and a hawk were my gifts. On the volcano, a crystal was my gift. On the ridge, for vultures circling and weaving feather and sky with shiny black feathers.
Blue schist slabs. I understand something more of geology. I have become a connoisseur of rocks, igneous, Franciscan, metamorphic.
I have forgotten all the rules. The club flag keeps whipping out prayers to the wind.
The sea answers. She is our mother. These shells, these rocks, are gifts and we will clean oil from the wings of birds because we were born into this passage.
The passage of a fellow soul is marked in the striated silver of my bracelets, dentalian and Jasper. The churning breathing of the sea, I've begun to tell the trees things I never knew I had inside.
The whispering of women, all those sea sounds. Surcease of wave, the crunch of rock and rolling of tires on pavement. Coyote brush in bloom. Timeout. People laughing. Just keep on going, one says. The whisper of the sea, the flag, we are all learning new languages to keep us on the shores.
I am in a camera facing the iris of my thoughts. The diaphragm open and close, open and close, like the contrasting and expanding universe. I capture some snippets of emotion after 20 days of testimony from the sea. The elegance of necessity crystallizes into a single vortex, the sea churning and churning, rising like a cover for sleeping bodies.
I dreamt I was in the city house, the twin beds of my grandparents hiding their arms, were they dead? No, only sleeping. I say, excuse me I didn't know you were there.
My grandfather is someone I don't recognize, he looks Italian and is smooth with the ladies. We talk soft so not to disturb my grandmother, she needs to sleep. And I comply, but who is this man to tell me this? He is my father whom I have not seen in 15 years. I dream of guns and falling over backwards, of sickness, and rolling on the ground with dogs. All this on the day Robert Duncan died.
2/5/1988
CPITS wokshopthis freewrite morphed into two poems
No comments:
Post a Comment