Twenty years ago, my first boyfriend, Bob Hamilton turned me towards the bay window of Zachim's Gallery on Main Street, placed nasturtiums and yellow calendula beneath my chin, tilted my rainhat back, turned me towards my reflection in the window, and said, This is how you will look at 40 or 50. We will come back and remember this day.
I couldn't imagine my life without him, for I still believed in love. The gray sea reflected in the window, but his potters thumbs were already molding the clay of my belly. I stood in front of that bay window, and inhaled the punishing odor of nasturtiums in autumn. The sea practiced nuances of turquoise and jade beneath a cloudy sky.
Two decades later, I stand in front of that same bay window and remember what was said, and not said. In the bookstore, I take solace in fingering the book spines in the poetry section, just seeing the names of all my friends in print is comforting. I am homesick, but there is nothing much to return home to.
The other night I told Karin Faulkner I was homesick. I am teaching nearly 200 teenagers from Windsor poetry and silk painting at the Mendocino Woodlands.
Karin's presence, dinner and a beer helped to settle me. The bartender treated us at the pub. Karin and I go out to see Dangerous Minds in Fort Bragg and we are weeping, Do not go gentle. Karin said, We poets are always on the edge of tears.
I understand my students better after the movie, and regain some center by sleeping at her cabin. The last time I slept here in the pygmy forest, years ago, was with Oleg from the Ukraine.
I walk the Mendocino Headlands, no use walking the streets, I have no use for most of what fills the stores. I am not a tourist. I pass the Mendocino Hotel, and remember nights at the bar, where we all gathered after readings and talked about poetry until closing. Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Bill Bradd, Jesse River, Devereau Baker, and Tom Robedeaux. Time was more gentle then.
I still want to sip coffee at the Café Beaujolais, but The Loft bookstore, an converted water tower, is now a bakery. Once, at The Loft, Leonard, Tom and I read poems on the crazily tilting floor. Poets are already a bit tilted, so it mattered not.
Leonard Cirino is well represented in the bookstore. I heard Tom Robideaux and Devereaux Baker split up and she went to Texas. Tom, I don't know where he went.
The For Sale sign, another death knell to the past. None of us can afford most of what's's being sold in the shops. As if poetry automatically carried its silent vow of poverty like a prayer flag against the wind. Mendocino's become too rich for most blood. People support new Irish knit sweaters with no patina of age, no shiny cuffs.
Once we lived along this coast like gypsies, sleeping within speaking distance of the ocean. We were part of the migration of artisans that began in the 1960s. The pygmy forest became our bed. Once we came up to help Sasha Makovkin unload his kiln, followed by a wild party of roast goat and vodka toasts as we baptized the new dinnerware fresh from the inferno.
Did that all really happen to me? It's as if memory itself had become fiction. And I could have forgotten all about it, and the sea caves in the middle of the bluff. but I drew a picture of it so I know I was there.
The masculine sea is pounding punishing the earth's vulva. The sheer drop into the sea astounds me. A prophylactic package is wedged in a groove on the fence railing. Why not here? I am envious of someone else's orgasms as if it still lingered in the salt air.
Walking the headlands, a poem is stuck, so alone, so lonely, yet so lovely. A breechbirth. I find myself looking for Sharon Doubiago's blue van, but it's no longer summer, she's headed up the coast.
Already I am rubbing shoulders with memory, the ghost haunting me. My eyes are doing funny things, I can only see the town as it was nearly a quarter of a century ago. The gallery where we once read poetry.
Sharon Doubiago's hair, like golden wings engulfing her face. And how her son, Danny stood there in front of their small cabin, just out of high school about to go off and play football for the Dallas Cowboys that bronze golden-haired manchild, and his slender sister, Shawn standing shyly behind him, deerlike, a carbon copy clone of her mother.
Memory is tricky for it tends to want to tell a story other than its own, and we are left with disembodied images. Ghosts.
And I am remembering the ones who stayed lost, how my childhood friend came here to lick her wounds, and raise a child. She was a friend from when horses came before boys, but later, the drugs took the reins. That all happened before the summer of love. She followed the bands who shaped the substance of a decade.
Karin's voice still seeps in from some of the old readings we gave at the McCallum House. We were the rainy day women: Karin Faulkner, Sharon Doubiago, Robin Rule, Cindy Frank, Mary Norbert Körte, Judith Tannembaum, and Marnie Purple. We were the poets lending our mellifluous voices to the wind.
Hunger gnaws at me but I deny myself food. The full moon is pulling on my blood, ambivalence choking my will. This place of uneasiness unleashes a savage, untamed and wordless poetry.
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