PRAYER FLAGS

PRAYER FLAGS

 

Once we lived along the coast, gypsies in vans, 

within spitting distance of the ocean. 

The pygmy forest was our bed, the ocean, our voice.

It's as if memory itself has turned to fiction. 

And I forgot about the sea caves lacing the bluffs. 

but I made an ink drawing, so I know I was there.

At the blowhole, the masculine sea punishes the earth. 

The sheer drop into tide pools, a mesmerizing vortex. 

Once we helped potter Sasha Makovkin unload his kiln, 

followed by a wild party of roast goat and lots of vodka,

we yelled nostrovya! beneath a full moon 

as we baptized new dinnerware fresh from the inferno. 

I once found a prophylactic wrapper wedged in the fence. 

Why not here? I envied those orgasms 

as if they still lingered in the salt air.

 

I rub shoulders with the inarticulate ghosts of memory,

and see the town through the translation of an old lens.

I pass the Mendocino Hotel, remembering long nights at the bar, 

where we gathered after readings and talked about poetry 

until closing. I want to slip back in time, 

have coffee at Café Beaujolais, but the old haunts, 

like the Loft, a water-tower bookstore—are all gone. 

Once we read poems lying down on that crazy tilted floor 

wondering if the coast winds might knock us all down.

Poets are already bent, so it mattered not. 

 

A litany of names tumbles from memory like rough beach stones: 

Bill Bradd, Leonard Cirino, Tom Robideaux, Steve Torre,

Jess River, Devreaux Baker,  Sharon Doubiago—

they were my true teachers. A reading at the McCallum House. 

Rainy Day Women: Karin Faulkner, Sharon Doubiago,

Robin Rule, Cindy Frank, Mary Norbert Körte, 

Judith Tannembaum, and Marnie Purple. Me.

Poets lending mellifluous voices to the storm.

Walking the headlands, a poem is stuck in my mouth,

so lonely, yet so lovely. But it’s a breech-birth. 

I find myself looking for Sharon's blue van, 

but it's the end of summer, she's already gone up the coast.

Burdened by the past, I can’t remember what was said,                                

But we knew all the For Sale sign was a death knell.                                    

None of us could afford the gifts in the shops,                                              

as poetry carried a vow of poverty, reverent                                                  

as prayer flags luffing in the wind. 

I learn the lesson anew: everything is lost in translation. 

Memory and poetry. Especially poetry.

 

Mendocino, 10/6/95, 

rev. 2024