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