I, Poet (personal essay)

By MAUREEN HURLEY

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be under. stood unless we read the two others, but of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.  —John Ruskin

When I was 10, I first heard my muse. I recall savoring une moment, a small Joycean epiphany, looking west, late afternoon. Out of the blue, a voice said: "Remember everything about your childhood because someday you'll become a writer.Startled, I looked around me. Not a being, except for my cat Winky who wandered by; surely he didn't suggest I become a writer. The resonant voice immediately amended that statement: not a famous one, of course." The muse then mumbled something about being known in small, but important circles. Important to whom?

1 was the only one filling the visible air, spiced with the pungency of black-green oaks and bay trees, clay dust, horse manure, and dry summer oat grasses seething in the afternoon heat. Panic-stricken, I felt guilty because at an early age—somewhere in the eternity between ages 3-1/2 and 4-I promised to become a visual artist like my mother. I remember watching her make India-ink lines on creamy paper magically transform into a three-dimensional object even I could recognize: a broken Christmas ornament. Much to her annoyance, I was literally drooling on her drawing, but I was hooked. All through school I declared myself an artist, even though one didn't major in a given field until college, as my school counselor so aptly pointed out. It took nearly 20 years before the prophecy of the pen took root.

Where do creative ideas come from? Life experience, pain, conflict—an attempt to give order to the chaos of the universe. Sometimes lines or words come to me in dreams, I say them over and over until I wake up, and then write them down. Easter Island is a mathematical equation of the mind. To trace back an idea is sometimes more cumbersome than just accepting it as a gift from the gods. Sometimes I just hear voices. No. 1 don't need psychoanalysis--it's merely a mater of tuning in to a particular channel. We all talk to ourselves. My grandmother wasn’t so silent about her internal dialogs. Often she discussed her facts with the empty room- usually a rant against the English, or the Anglo-Saxons, who, according to her, were responsible for all the world's woes. Perhaps it helps to have an eccentric Irish grandmother to stimulate the writing process. Or nostalgia for the past, and a desire to find order. I suspect my dyslexia has a lot to do with how I perceive the world. I hear things differently; it both helps and hinders the process. 

The computer has made a vast difference in my life as a writer—that doesn't stop my fingers from typing the wrong letters, though; shape-changers p, b, g, q still refuse to toe the line. I can think all jumbled up and it's OK, because later I can unravel the tangled ideas and give them a logical order. Perhaps it was the computer that allowed me to blossom as a writer. But I began writing by longhand, transcribing everything to calligraphy because I couldn't type. (I now type with four fingers and an occasional thumb.) 

This room, with its indirect morning light, a permeable membrane, like the boundaries of skin, translates the air with origins. We each bring with us the burden from earlier fires, but here we unwrap genetic coals, and though there's no longer a hearth, it is a placeholder for an idea. We can’t quite let go up. Late at night when there’s a little else to sustain us, words burn across the page. —From "Stacking Wood for Celia" —by Maurcen Hurley

I refused to take typing in school because I didn't want to be a secretary or a teacher. So now I make my living as a writer and a teacher as an artist in residence. I've been lucker than most writers in that I’ve been able to survive at my craft. Eventually the computer helped me to think logically enough to write my grants for six California Arts Council artist-in-residency projects at Mark West School, and a short project at Napa State Hospital, Another grant gave me a year's worth of work exploring Sonoma County heritage at Matanzas School in Santa Rosa eventally launching me into the Soviet poetry and art exchange, which has absorbed nearly all my available time for the past two years. A poem from that journey, “Country of Origin," recently won the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Poetry Award. It seemed funny that the award chock presented to me was from the investigative journalism fund—yet many poets and writers were journalists as well.

Hemingway comes to mind. He said, "Trivel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up." Though I tend to write lying down, travel always stimulates my writing process, because the newness is a sharp foil against the complacency of what is known. I started wandering at an early age. Macy’s in San Francisco with its escalators hiding dragons beneath the bottom step, scared, but didn’t deter me. I wound up smothered in the coat racks, ghostly rattle of hangers whispering among themselves. On horseback or anything similar (we rode anything on four hooves), we explored the long north-south ridges that traversed West Marin, where you can see the bell curve of the ocean arching beyond Tomales, headlands and Point Reyes Peninsula, a floating island. Later, the Sierras, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Galapagos, Europe, and Russia beckoned. 

Our family has always maintained a fierce, unsellable love for the land. I suppose I inherited it without really knowing what it encompassed. The land itself, shapes, culture, art, and cuisine. Growing up in a pristine area, strikingly similar to Coleman Valley, shaped my art. I remember my neighbors visiting sister, Borg, exclaiming on, and on how beautiful it was, where we lived, the fresh air, etc. I suppose we were spoiled, but we knew no other life. The horses took us across the boundaries of freedom and change in the form of fences and county lines and home. I had to leave west Marin to stand the concept of beauty; by understanding the loss, after the fact. Maybe that who was responsible for the distillation of vague ideas into tangible writing. Is my story any different from that of an inner city rider? Other than locale, I suspect the primary impulses are the same, my story is any writers story. 

VARIATIONS IN WHITE AND BLACK

       Language is the music of thought.
 —Andrei Vosnesenski

The composer Satie, who ate only what was white
would've loved this cavernous room suspended from dark beams
with its white rug, walls and venetian blinds of white linen.
The hostess, the guests, even the keyboards of the baby grands
and our poems—all in variations of white and black.
Sighting down the vault created by the raised piano lids
snuggled in each other's curves like tired lovers,
Kirk and Marilyn play a four-handed improvisation
on Pachelbel's Canon in D. Dah dada dá dah-dum. . .  I think: gun barrel.
Just after the war we are overly sensitive to images of war.
Sasha, a Soviet vet who survived fire, reads about Afghanistan.
More piano wires taut around the slender necks of poems
of those who can never break free or go back:
Marilyn to Cuba, Oleg to the Ukraine, Sasha to his unscarred face.
We prepare to read translations, but because each line
requires a leap of faith from one image to the next,
we fine-tune them mid-air. Music is the mother of mathematics.
At one point, near the end of Haydn's Variations by Brahms,
the notes begin to merge, forming new ones like hawks mating mid-flight.
At the right moment a chorus of frogs joins in
but there's a hole in the sky; how do they measure time?
As the last note descends, it is silent; they say frogs
are the living barometers of the earth's health.
They say Gaia's final chorus will be silence in spring.
They say in some places it's already begun.
Where does a Möibius strip begin and end?
Sasha transliterates Kirk's name, and we are drunk on this music,
the sum of this defenseless layer of human culture.
Notes leaping over the small mossy stones in our ears
add up to a temporary respite from the shadows of raptors—
useless angels of the war, any war.
Even the frogs are listening to the Hallelujah Chorus.
3/29/91
Santa Rosa 1991 The Paper Sasha: Alexandr Karpenko

Why, I write is to heal something within myself. It’s the most vulnerable act I know of, to be a poet. Perhaps it’s also the most practical of the art. As a painter, I turned my back on the world, working in isolation. I was mute and shy; communicating was the hardest thing I could choose, and so, having no words for what was boiling over, I began to write reams and reams—not calling it poetry. That came later. Perhaps it was the dissatisfaction with the pimping and whoring of the art world that made me turn my back on it. Or it was a time to grow in another direction, to become literate. Once, I interviewed KPFA talk show host, Joan Marler, who said the reason why she got into radio programming was to prove to herself she was intelligent. As a practicing dyslexic, I know the story all too well. The supreme challenge for me is to paint pictures with words. To string two ideas together, to prove that I have a brain.

 

Dostoevsky said everyone is an artist. I like working with children in poetry and art because they’re closest to the creative process. As a writer, I keep going back to early childhood memories, and I wish I hadn’t waited until I was 27 before writing, my first poem, such as it was. Everyone has a poetic, voice (or creativity), it’s merely a matter of finding, and uncovering it—sort of like being a detective. I belong to a “detective agency” (code name: private, Irish), we meet once a year to read poetry, and to play softball. What we have in common is the love of language; this is what bonds us. I tell students, “as artists we’re  spies. We record what’s around us.” Poetic license to snoop. In art there is no one “right “answer. In fact, there are multiple solutions. Sometimes the third or 10th solution is better than the first. Art requires going back again, working with material until it feels “right,” it requires persistence. As with science, it comes from those hunches and intuition. If we always knew what we are going to say, or paint, why bother? 

Poetry is not limited to what is “poetic. “Poetry, the apex of culture, is the distillation of human expression. The integration of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves should coalesce in a poem. The Mayans and Aztecs called it the flowered word. Poetry is a form of activism that took me into the schools – to effect change, to make sure the children were getting the tools to help them put their feelings in perspective with the logical world. Poetry is empowerment. It’s political. It saves lives. 

To be a poet, one must live life fully. You have to have something to write about, a need to tell someone the story, and a reason to write it. If you’re stuck, ask yourself: who is my audience? Whom do I write for and why? It could be to yourself, to your peers, or to the tribe at large. We spend a lifetime designing an imposed order on this chaos of thought. One can feel so alone in the midst of the personal journey of the creative process. I think we need both aloneness and fear— some inner conflict to hone the creative process, forcing us to write. I have to write, it’s not a matter of choice. There’s no magical formula used. You just do it and do it and do it. It’s also about self empowerment. It offers another perspective on responding to the painter Gauguin’s question about who and what we are, and where we are going. An interesting study was done on art and madness. Of course, writers, artist, and schizophrenics shared similar symptoms. All the artists weren’t clinically insane, they just seem that way. It’s because we delve deeper into the unconscious and utilize it in our craft. We render it, give it shape; a byproduct to heal ourselves. Art is a process, not a product. This is why art is a mirror reflecting back to who we are. The only trustworthy mirror we have. 

The battle of the sexes continues to operate between the sheets making no distinction between lines of gender, the shore line, midline, line of declination, the screen phosphor line, a line fed to us from the psyche, the gods, or another man or woman wanting something other than commitment between church and state, war and peace, enemy and friend. —From "Sunday Morning, Berth 1-Il" —by Maureen Hurley

A poem is like a stone thrown into the pond of our collective unconsciousness. A small splash—concentric ripples spreading out into the conscious dimensions of the larger pond of humanity—can affect change.

Plato said "all knowledge is recollection." Keats said poetry is what is recollected in tranquility. And now, in this technological revolution, when we re barraged with facts, it's hard to string them together, to make a deeper sense of them beyond the shallow impressions. The role of the poet is to reinvent the myths. We've been on a crash course, destroying what we believe in, and as a species, we need the myths in order to survive. Like dreaming. Otherwise we enter inton world of nihilism, of denial. This is why there are gangs in search of identity, they form tribes in order to know who they are. Pocts are the keepers of the conscience of the larger tribe of man; they give shape and meaning to our existence. These small stones thrown inte the pool of the world leave concentric ripples lapping on the near and far shores of our thoughts. As the good doctor-post William Carlos Williams said: it is difficult getting the news from poetry but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

• 
  
• Why I Am A Writer (MA paper)
• See Letter to the editor on my memoir, I, Poet
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Journal entry, 6/29/91, Oleg calls from Indio, California

 6/29/91 Oleg calls from on the road, Indio California. I tell him he’s in the San Andreas Fault bed. The Salton Sea, the Sea of Cortez. He asks if the San Bernardino Mountains are the Rockies. He has no idea. No, I say the Sierras, simplifying geography a bit. I tell him how the peninsula of Point Reyes came from there along the fault, though it was probably from the Tehachapes, or at least that’s what geologist say. But most of those same granite outcroppings extend all the way to Cabo San Lucas. At Point Reyes I saw the same kind of rock as I did in Cabo. How I love the story of rocks.

Anyway, finally, I think I made a geologic impression on him after all this time. He’s never fully grasped the magnitude of the idea of how living along the fault line has shaped our culture and our coastline. He doesn’t think of the earth is moving because we can’t measure it with the naked eye.
When he called, he said he was in Forestville, he said he couldn’t leave me, then he amended it by saying he was in Indio. It was a joke maybe not in the best of taste, considering the circumstances. I had mixed reactions.

I was willing to go and pick him up, but I had a pang of dread, thinking of all I had to do before I left for Hawaii at 5 AM on Monday morning. Both of us were trying to pack at the same time. It wasn’t working. So I said squelched my needs in order to meet his needs. I still haven’t physically packed though I did all my bills and chores.

I couldn’t pack with him in the house. He was ending a way of life, while I was merely preparing for a short respite from the interruptions of the past nine months.

Having Oleg in my tiny house was definitely a pattern breaker. So, my life was turned upside down. Rather than face the emptiness of his not being here, I opted to get out of the house. A complete change of scene. Hawaii. The eclipse will take my mind off the past year’s events, and hopefully it will launch me into the next stage of my life, whatever that is.

And so, his call was welcome, though I fought down the guilty beasts rising within myself. Why don’t I like to answer the phone? Fear of responsibility, and of what is to come. I hated it when he called, asking me of my plans and is pathetic hangdog voice. I’d love to make over his telephone voice too, because I knew I always had to come and get him wherever he was. Beck and call. I was always responsible like a mother to a child, and I hated it. I loved it when he was self-reliant, which wasn’t often, but it seems we fight too hard to get there. My secondary emotions, resentment and anger included all the primary emotions.

I just re-learn the word sublime from the ground up. To pass from solid to gaseous state without going through ice to steam. Turner’s paintings are sublime landscapes, Wind, steam and fog. I too learned to pass from one state to another, bypassing logical progression, into the sublime state. Pavlovian emotions. How to stop the roller coaster heart now?

He forgot five rolled cigarettes In the Bugler can on top of the clock radio. Women are more sensitive to smell, than men—it’s biogenetic. We are born that way. It makes sense—food, danger, sex, all carrying odor with a message of one kind or another like the on/off binary code of computers. Pixels. Danger/no danger. I hated the smell of tobacco, rolled, unrolled, loose, burnt, etc. Nothing to do. My nose smells the minutest particles. I could smell him rolling cigarettes in the kitchen while I stood in the bedroom doorway 8 feet away. Sometimes it made me sneeze.

The past few months I’ve had to take allergy pills day and night to suppress my allergies as it was an unusually bad pollen season. His cigarettes, my down comforter, and pollen were too much for my immune system. I kept getting short term viruses with a duration of a few days to a week, the worst part is the low grade fevers and the night sweats. Of course it scares me, AIDS foremost on my mind. None of us can completely rest assured when it comes to our sexual past. I saw a gripping documentary Absolutely Positive, how HIV affects lives, both straight and gay. I guess the hardest part is to get to the no blame section as the I Ching says.

No, I never got to the no blame, or at least it was pretty rare. I did it times achieve that state, saying to him, no blame, but when you do A, B, or C, this is what happens within me…
How can we avoid this möbius loop? Issues of time being the most prevalent.

I took Oleg to meet my family after we went to Point Reyes. He said he wanted to. I didn’t suggest it, but I pointed out landmarks dear to me— my hill, Mount Barnabe, and the Olema Hill Road. We were on our way to Bolinas and Mount Tam for the solstice. As it turned out, we hiked to the other end of the point, Chimney Rock at 4:47 PM, or whenever the precise moment the solstice was, and missed it. I wasn’t aware that the solstice happened at a certain time, I was waiting for sunset to celebrate.

At the solstice I was alone, enclosed within the circle overlook, a wooden fence, very much like a wooden Stonehenge watching the sun set due west behind the lighthouse. I was alone on the edge of the continent, celebrating the sun, something far older than me within, and across the naked fields, a small black dot, man’s torso, Oleg always lagging far behind.

I had gotten tired of waiting for him and forged on ahead, alone, but this is the way I experience the openness of nature best. Alone, elemental. Surrounded by sea and sky, light, wind, earth. But he came into my circle. And we watched the waves crash below us, I pointed out Point Reyes, to the west, Drake’s Bay, and the scalloped cliffs to our right. I’m on an island in time, we were on another island, it seems like Scotland or Ireland. Nova Albion. I get it.

I wore a nylon jacket from the 20th century and there were boats in the harbor, but it was as if time itself didn’t exist. My determined pilgrimage, my mindlessly running to this place, only to have the uncanny sensation of having had a similar experience before, unnerved me. But my relationship with Oleg has been filled with déjà vu from the very beginning. He was supposed to stay this long, I guess.

I remembered another useless dream about schedules, etc., fragments of conversation, meaningless in the dream, but they still came true nearly two years after the fact. Because I write down what I remember of my dreams, I have a running fact sheet of images. The earthquake dream came true too. The rubber band dream with the red carnations defied logic. Oleg had rubber bands around his neck with me helping him to adjust them.

In another dream, we were on Highway 101 by Cotati, heading north to Santa Rosa. Instead, in real life, I took him to the San Francisco depot late at night, I had placed a red carnation in his food bag. And there were plenty of rubber bands around his luggage items, as it seems. In fact, he took all of my fat rubber bands, only Leaving two behind, just like in the dream. I have the elements of the dream right here. The order may be out of sync or it hasn’t happened yet.

And so we went to my grandmothers house, had dinner with Jane and my mom. So many cornflowers or bachelor buttons in bloom in the field below. Oleg said they grew among the rye in the Ukraine considered a weed, but to describe a beautiful girl was like cornflowers among the rye, all blonde hair and blue eyes. I realized my darkness, my hair and my eyes were the opposite of assumed beauty in the Ukraine, with its predominance of blue-eyed blondes.

Home, this land I love, and roses filled the path to the upper garden. We struggled in the tangle. I showed him plants. Huge bushes, rosemary and flowering peach that I had planted in the rocky, barren soil as a child. I season our food with sprigs of rosemary from the parent bush of my grandmother’s garden. I’ve made many progeny. Several here in Forestville as well as elsewhere. Rosemary the blue sea rose of my name and of remembrance. Roman cliffs, Italy, the sea.

We said goodbye to the sun setting in the northerly gap on Mt. Barnabe. Fitting that I should come home, appropriate accident. Later, my mother tells me that my uncle Bill has lung cancer. I am so angry knowing he was missing a half a lung from TB and yet he continued to smoke. I’m surprised it took this long to catch up. Jane, Oleg, and my mother continue to smoke as she tells me the details.

The open window and the air purifier is for my benefit, the asthma that comes from inhaling cigarette smoke, will not help their lungs. I flash angerly at Oleg. See why I want you to stop? I say it just brings more death. He continues to smoke. I pointed to my mother, saying how our family is riddled with cancer. She had breast cancer, an,uncle died of melanoma, and my aunt Toddy has skin cancer and breast cancer. My grandfather’s throat cancer from the cigars. In defiance, he draws another halo of smoke around his shoulders, the pleasure on his face is unmatched even by sex. Even with the knowledge of death, they enjoy their guilty addiction, subtle, thorough and lasting.

I want to mail those last five cigarettes to Oleg just to get them out of my house but I am aiding and and abetting by mailing them back to him, or am I? Grim reminders of death. I leave for Hawaii soon. When my uncle be alive when I return on 21 July? I talk of returning to my childhood home, living in a trailer in the garden. Oleg says it would be coming down in life to live this way, it would be regressing, that I’m better off staying in Forestville. Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. A middle class Soviet.

I never liked my uncle Bill, especially when he tried to sell our land right out from under us. My grandmother crying one summer evening as he laid down the news. Who was he, living in a tract home, to tell us what to do with our land? In a rage I attacked him verbally. I wasn’t even 12 years old and he never for gave me for my adult anger in a child’s body.

And I never forgave him for manipulating us, trying to break up our family. Put her in a nursing home, what happened to me and Guy? The enemy was a man all right, within the family. Eldest born son with the arrogance to match. Shades of the dream. The white cylindrical tubes, the glistening silver lines—what significance can I attach to the number four?

Sarcasm is the first form of humor. I think of the word sarcophagus. Phagos. The body devouring itself. Cancer. Give me another fag. I can hear my uncle asking, as he lies, so white and pale on the bed. I want to tell him, the Little League coach, that the bases are loaded this time, and who is left to steal home?

Journal entry, 6/29/91, dropping off Oleg Atbashian

6/29/93 12:38 AM, what better time than to start a new journal, having just dropped Oleg Atbashian off at the San Francisco Greyhound station, the end of relationship, end of a project—and a new beginning with my art. I am really ready to be done with him.

Sad to report it since Oleg’s been here, I’ve only filled one journal. Nine months of relationship absorbing all my free time. So much conflict with us, the useless arguing, we even managed to contradict each other on our final ride to San Francisco. He’s on his way to LA, then to Fort Worth, New York, and then home to the USSR. He was definitely saying goodbye forever, and I guess whatever we had, the experiment that failed, it’s gone forever, though we told each other I love you, what is there really?

He goes back to his kids and wife in the Ukraine. What of her? Someone said Nadia went to the authorities to report him missing, having abandoned his family. I can’t help but wonder what horrors he will face when he gets home.

All his American loot will bring much excitement. Two heavy suitcases, a backpack, and a Macintosh. Between the two of us, we could barely carry it all. How will he managed if no one meets him in Fort Worth, or New York? I can’t imagine him in the Moscow Airport trying to get to Kiev train station. But that is no longer my worry.

When I think of my lover leaving, it makes me cry. When I think of all the technical difficulties, I remain dry-eyed. I can’t imagine why he so easily riles me up. Yesterday, after making love, we finally talked a little bit about ourselves, and the relationship. The scary part is how alike we are. So, even though he was from a completely different culture and language, we managed to find a twin of ourselves. Dysfunctional match. He said I was like his grandfather and I said he is like my grandmother.

The constant contradictions in arguments over trifles—we both became our own worst enemies, and exorcised our personas on each other with predictable results. We’re both equally guilty of something we had little control over. I often felt possessed by a demonic urge to challenge, to be hard, and he really brought out a side of me from my childhood that I don’t like at all. He says we’re too alike to have a relationship. We are two pluses, we each need a negative to balance us out. He thinks similarity is a bad thing. I think it’s positive.

Stalemate. Checkmate. Guilt is a motivating factor, feelings of inadequacy. He says I’m more of a male-female while he is a feminine male. The problem is, it’s easy for him to not develop and grow, he lets me take the role of responsibility and he becomes a parasite, like the male parasite fish attached permanently to the side of the colossal female, so huge, that scientist at first assumed they were two different species.

He said he learned a lot from me, not necessarily positive. He said he learned that he needs to be kinder. I probably tenderized him enough to make his relationship with his wife better, such bitter  irony there. Where does love fit into all of this conflict? He says to remember the bad times when you wanted me out of the house, it’ll make it easier.

So easy for us to cry, and to hold each other. In bed we were friends, better lovers than workmates. A reversal of our role in Cherkassy. Emotionally, it was a roller coaster, though I seemed to retain a clarity as to why I reacted, and felt the way I did, but I was helpless to prevent the emotional upheaval.

What do tears mean, and those three words, I love you? Values. Sex wasn’t enough to make the relationship work—really work. We both wanted something more tranquil and supportive. Instead we got chaos, and fireworks. I felt angry because I was having to do so much work to keep us physically afloat. Maybe having him in my territory was the real problem. We talked about the conflict there too—we both want to occupy the same territory and I’m not used to sharing that space, and neither is  he. He thinks he began to recognize some of my criticisms were based upon truth after all.

It’s going to seem strange sleeping alone, our silly mammalian talk, horses and rummaging rights, penguin talk and blue sky acts. Once he rubbed my ass saying blue sky! And the sky turned blue. It stuck and every time he wanted blue skies to appear, he’d rub my ass. Silly things that lovers too. I’ll miss the affection and the sex it was satisfying—for the most part.

His odd quirk, his dislike of my breathing on him never changed, it continue to hurt my feelings when he turned his head away. He had enough phobias, it sometimes made life difficult. He was so intolerant of my animal love noises, my licking and biting and scratching. I was surprised when he asked me to scratch him very gently the other day. It took us a long time to trust each other sexually.

His changeability, apparently a cancer trait, was very unhealthy for me, creating a whole scenario of mistrust. We never quite molded each other into the likeness that we each desired. We never quite accepted each other the way we are, flaws and all.

Luis says there’s a danger in trying to remake someone, codependency. I was definitely trying to remake Oleg over. The entire fucked Soviet system of co-dependency equaling love. And to his credit, he did improve in many areas. I told him how difficult it was for me to have someone entirely dependent upon me. How it drained me. He really was foolishly wise. Childlike in so many ways. We really were from different eras, time travelers. But the hourglass shattered.

TRINITY

TRINITY 

from a drawing by Marsha Connell, White Sands Guardians

When Marsha drew 
rock formations at Stallion Gate,
naming them White Sands Guardians,
she knew nothing of their history
witnesses to Ground Zero, 
and the new green desert glass, trinitite—
On July 16th,1945,
the sand fused for miles
by Trinity; a destroyer of worlds,
said J. Robert Oppenheimer.
This is the place 
where Billy the Kid 
& Pancho Villa last rode
on The Trail of the Dead.

This is the place
where ghosts of the Cold War 
swarmed in hissing sands, 
where fathers and sons listened 
to the sounds of war 
growling across a cloudless sky
announce the birth 
of the nuclear age.

This is the place 
where blood stained white sands, 
and the threefold nightmare 
of a black flower bloomed,
riding across the world 
at the speed of light.   


6/91 & 7/16/92                                                                        

Walden Pond reading, Oakland, with Mimi Albert, Sharon Mayes, Deborah Fass

 

WHY I AM A POET

WHY I AM A POET


The silhouette of a bird on a telephone pole
a raven, a vulture, a hawk? Too big.
I swerved and braked the truck—
in the sunlight, a golden eagle,
too close to civilization, and I understood
why they're called golden; they are luminous.
Spotting eagles within city limits
isn't reason enough to write a poem about it.
What am I supposed to do now?
Tell the world I hang eagle feathers
from my ceiling to keep away bad dreams?
We feel compelled to talk of more human things
site-specific, but now I've seen rare eagles
where they're not supposed to be.
We've come to expect vultures and crows
with whom we co-exist so beautifully.
The raptor who faced near-extinction
isn't reason enough to celebrate;
our sights are limited to an occasional red-tail
on the fringes of society, and we are satisfied.
We always have trouble imagining
anything beyond our own limitations.


6/91