Happiness setpoint freewrite

The bar for the happiness setpoint is ever raising for those without joy. No sooner do they reach the pinnacle where happiness, like a lenticular cloud hovers over the summit like a flying saucer up in its own weather system, blithely incarnating folklore about the Lemurians and Proto Atlanteans. Notice, how all the cool guys are from another planet. Not like Jesus, who was born within the midst. That’s mist with a D, folks. The idea being that a savior should come from within the throngs, the brainwashed hordes, not the elites. No matter that the couple was enroute to a census. Stand up and be counted. 

And the Bible belters of Jesusland are cheering on the war in Iraq, they rejoice when another tree falls, when Armageddon comes. The sooner the better, where they will be saved. Imagine their happiness: the end is nigh. They rejoice and sing modern day timbrels to the Lord in the street, sawhetting across the face of mother earth in the commute lane of exponential catastrophe.

It reminds me of the politician, who said. When you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all. And ketchup is a vegetable. And that other wonder that burning bush in the White House who today declared $250,000 plates to eat an inaugural dinner with the president, wanting a ceiling on the price of a plate so that school teachers and bus drivers could afford to attend the inauguration. There are happiness setpoints considerably lower than a quarter of million. 

But look, all the stars are ablaze in the heavens, only in America where happiness is legislated. But the Bible thumpers say the end is nigh. The world will end on December 31. The rapture is nigh. God bless America. 

12/10/2004. Writers’ Group

Candlelight freewrite

A slender finger of light dances in the breeze, Shiva’s nail scratching the darkness. A cat lies in the sun, sharpens, her claws, stretches, yawns, her become jewels in the night. Phosphor fire. Either fear or science will make an excuse for her eyes. Retinal mirror scrying the soul. 

Have you ever looked at house windows and seen them as eyes following you as you walk down and unfamiliar street at night? What thoughts arise? But look, a light in the window, harkening back to centuries before. Someone placed a candle in the window, so that the dearly departed could find their way back home. 

Candlelight in each window, the flickering pupil, sentient, ever watching. The hurricane lamp from the turret for sailors coming in from the sea. Bonfires on the hill. Markers of time. Names for surcease, for that dark moment when lights no longer drink in the darkness. 

That solstice when the sun sleeps, when we light the candles, and the moths circling the fire, confuse them for the stars. The odor of wings like burning hair, angel hair, when the rain comes when we’re weaned from the electric grid, freed from the tyranny of Edison’s light dream, the candle becomes a ritual for dinner, reduced to romantic interludes or for religious reasons. 

Or birthdays, marking the passage of time, or the big bang. Dangerous candles, soaring light tapers for the church, split an atom, a sesame seed of blue light, a seed pearl at the center of everything. Imagine a flashlight as a placeholder in its stead. Imagine the inventor of the candle. What did he use for wicks dipped in tallow and honey. 

12/10/2004 Writers’ Group

FOUND POETRY: VICODAN

thought weather trouble
blue house stand fast
last luck lord engaged
wife, she remained
respect finished
they point
surely part class drop
likely raised offer
fancy share afterwards
stayed period

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

TURKEY BIRTHDAZE

’T’was the day before Thanksgiving

and all through the houses

plump turkeys were thawing, not petit grouses!

Though the cupboards were groaning

all the tables were laid bare. What? No carousing?

My birthday comes but once a year.

"We forgot," cried relatives and spouses

to friends and neighbors moaning in thin air.

They scolded their watches & their PDAs too,

"it's not that we don't care. Really, we do.

Forgive us. We really forgot. It wasn't a plot.

Forgive us, our memory's got dry rot. Or ergot.

We'll make it up to you at Christmas. Never fear."

Lest I complain, "let them eat crow," (or cake)

one year, even my mom forgot, alas, heartbreak!

I don't hold my breath lightly, nor do I lend an ear,

for tomorrow will come when pigs learn to fly

by all those pumpkin and mince pies in the sky

without gobbling them up, none for the throngs.

So much for the promises of yesteryear—

or even next year. Now, don't get me wrong.

Indeed I long for that glutton of a beast

with all the trimmings of a glorious feast.

I dispense fowl blessings reiterated with grace.

Hope springs eternal, so I save a small place

for dessert — because it might be a bit of cake.

OK, I’m quirky if I confuse turkeys with candles.

And tomorrow when we dismantle the big bird

I’ll blow out the drumstick with a wing and a prayer.

I won’t let this bailiwick of a pilgrim’s parlance,

betrayer of fowlish deeds, with dissonance absurd

occlude my birthday with a yam dance. Not a chance!

Conclude your fawning and hemming and hawing.

Pass the blasted dressing. For next year, never fear

my birthday will reappear on Thanksgiving Day. OK?

Pity my poor cousin born on Christmas Eve

and not to grieve on such a moveable feast.

11/24/2004

In North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle

11/17/ 2004  We’re in Myles O'Reilly's pub at 622 Green St. in North Beach awaiting Neil Jordan and Roddy Doyle. Ha, ha, ha, we're all drinking somebody's open swill – Pinot Noir for breakfast. Ugh. I was hoping for food. It’s Myles’s birthday. The jazz club band brings us in with a little swing, some Maria Callas, and the Tarantella and the Godfather meets the Irish in North Beach.

Nearly an hour later, Roddy Doyle saunters in and steps up to the microphone, taps it thunderously, and says he's now a Yank, having been in nine cities in 10 days. We laugh.

Doyle is bald as a skinhead, it takes some getting used to. He read from Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and a small bit on Henry Smart, an IRA volunteer, from A Star Called Henry, and some stray bits from a play he's been working on, and then he thanked Elgie Gillespie for making this so. There is a River of free flowing booze. By this point, we're all fairly toasted.

Neil Jordan, steps up, looking upscale and fashionably thuggish, wearing shades, having just returned from a TV interview, he's a rare bit of gloom, despite it being sunny, midday. Maybe the alcohol's wearing off. 

He begins with: I know when I died, May 1950. It was a rare whinge, the perspective is written from that woman. He ended on an upbeat note: George killed me... He reads from The Dream of a Beast, with a segue into Interview with the Vampire.

After they were finished reading, there was a Q&A. Someone asks: Would you like to write The Commitments today?

Roddy Doyle said, Well, I'd need to express the conditions along similar lines. The Irish, the blacks of Europe would figure into it.

Jordan said the USA has been good to me, re: The Crying Game. 

Phoenix rising freewrite (drawing)

A phoenix rises from the ashes, is it Ash Wednesday, or resurrection, or soot from the chimney, midwinter, a creosote threat, sparks climbing the night sky, seeking distant cousins. The Perseids and Leonids flash, Astro fire, cat’s-eyes glowing. The phoenix lust, and foxfire, the moon, hidden behind clouds, bows at the torii gate. Heaven and earth. Wind and sky. Fire in the head. 

I am the word of science, the song of Amergen, as he set forth upon the land of Ireland for the first time. I am the fire in the head, I am a work of art rising from the ashes. Bone ash, white, hot, bonfires to couch, the sun, to bring it back after the darkness. 

My great grandfather drove cattle between two bonfires, their mad eyes glowing as they charged forth. Holy smoke anointed the sky and settled down, phoenix, rising. The tears of the phoenix will heal the mortally wounded. But after hearing one truth but she waited so long. When the bird lands, the land, the air is transform by fire. Flight and wings of ash falling down to earth nourishing it. 

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

Singing, dancing in the rain, the world is transformed, even the gutters lose distinction with the sidewalks and curbstones. The rain pounds the pavement with such vigor that the streets are transformed into vast, gray trampolines, and the Magritte’s Golconda jumpers are falling from the clouds. Not to mention the cats and dogs. The rain bounces up and blurs that distinction between street and curb, ocean and sky. 

Today, in my Elder writing group at Merrill Gardens, one old woman from the northern provinces, tried to reconstruct images of home. She wanted to become a phoenix and rise up from her own ashes in another country. She studied hard to be a doctor. Tomorrow I’ll be 88, she said. I have not thought about China for many years. She is beginning to remember after forgetting the atrocities of the past for so many years.

She said, Once it was raining in her village, the Japanese had invaded, so she walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. She needed to be the strong one, she didn’t let go of her young cousin’s hand, not even when the rain beat down with such force, that their legs turned yellow from the mud. She tells me that the Yangtze means yellow river.

Rivulets made their way to the ocean, to the China Sea, and the school became a raft across the sea to Africa, to the Sahara, and then to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, the place of flowers, where she made her escape and met her husband in transit, waiting there for years as he perfected his surgery on the open heart. 

The breakthrough operation was the first of its kind in a country of parched thirst, under siege, in a drought. She wears an umbrella for the sun. She is waiting for her people to go to Cold Mountain, where she watched her first movie of a man with an umbrella, singing and dancing in the rain, and his heart was full. He was dancing with an open heart. The rain rose up, like a flock of phoenixes, seeking the eye of the sun.

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group

Total eclipse of the moon, freewrite

We watched a total eclipse of the moon from Treasure Island. The moon was like a Oreo cookie. The moon dangled over the Bay bridge, and the shadows nibbled with a dark hunger, until only the Sea of Tranquility was visible. I don’t know if it really is the sea, a swirling land formation at the top of the moon was more visible than normal. Hunters moon, being eaten by its prey and Samhain on its heels.

Time to remember the dead and offer their names up for the end of the year. That tradition got thoroughly bungled and swallowed in the Christian struggle against paganism, it got mired down and mixed up a couple of months. And everybody thinking January is the new year but it’s really November 1, All Saints’ Day. Then the second holiday was needed for all the souls who didn’t quite make it to heaven because they needed more time to work off their sins—as if they were on the moon, swallowed by the light by the shadow. Obscure and unseen. 

The Chinese said the red moon was a Dragon’s blood moon. A baleful red eye in the sky, watching all the people lined up in city canyons to peer through telescopes, as the moon verged on red, as if balancing atop the Transamerica building. Some said the red moon was bad luck, but red is the color of good fortune, the color of brides and the color of wealth.  

The bride of a moon peeking out from behind the earths’s shadow is shedding a wealth of light on us, no red moon of war. Everyone out on the streets is a little bit crazy and pointing at the moon, checking up on it, as if it wasn’t to be believed, or trusted and wondering where the man in the moon went. Full moon over Geary Street and a baleful dragon’s eye, bloodshot and drunk on all the smog.

10/29/04 Writers’ Group

What was in the attic? freewrite

God only knows what was up in the attic. It sounded like chains being dragged across the two by fours, someone shuffling convict chains, but we were far from the south, or the old world. This house is too new for ancient shenanigans a la Lady Rochester. Wrong continent, wrong coast for this sort of thing. An occasional thump punctuated each step as if someone were dragging a body down the back stairs, the head banging on each step. Only thing is, we don’t have a back stairs coming down from the attic, only a trap door, but I kept my eye on it just in case. 

The stove pipe was an echo chamber. I could hear the sporadic barking of a lazy watchdog, who felt obligated to bark a staccato at specific intervals. An owl practiced his calls. There was a faint SSS sound swishing—was it trees or bats or rain falling? A musty, damp smell as if from the grave, but then the attic grew ominously quiet. I didn’t know what was worse the noise, or the silence. 

Grandma told me ghost stories about how the dead preferred glamorous castles to a lone farmhouse in the country. The sound of something coming closer was directly overhead now. What could it be? A raccoon? My grandmother rose from the couch to refill her cup of tea in the kitchen. The ceiling bulged and groaned, and the sheetrock gave way. An avalanche of water and plaster cascaded down onto the couch where she was sitting just minutes before.

10/29/2004 Writers’ Group

Indiana Review Collaboration/Collage project Elemental Portraits

The Indiana Review
Collaboration/Collage 

Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

THE COLLABORATION/COLLAGE PROCESS:

Poet Maureen Hurley and pianist-composer Kirk Whipple first met during a series of Soviet-American cultural exchange programs in the USSR and the USA. Whipple, who studied at the Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, performed in the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, Moscow, U.S.S.R., while Hurley was giving poetry readings and facilitating poetry and art exchanges in Moscow, Leningrad, and Cherkassy, a city near Kiev.

Hurley and Whipple performed together for Sister City cultural events in Sonoma County, California. During a series of benefit concerts, Hurley wrote several poems based on Kirk Whipple’s performances which won several awards and fellowships. Whipple approached Hurley with the idea to collaborate from the ground floor: to create poems as he was developing and composing a series of nocturnes for two pianos, compositions inspired by Chopin’s set of nocturnes for solo piano. Whipple is executive director, and co-founder with wife, Marilyn Morales, of the Unconservatory, Inc. (1988). Each of the individual pieces from Elemental Portraits were inspired by people very close to the composer or who were affiliated with the Unconservatory.

Hurley and Whipple met during 1992-1996 to collaborate on the musical compositions. First, Whipple played a piece in progress and Hurley freewrote to it. She interviewed him where he shared his musical composition book of dreams, conversations, observations, songlines, and musical phrases… She then interviewed the people who inspired each of the eleven Nocturnes. When the pieces were completed, she wove together a collage of the three strands of storyline, observation and impression.

In 1995, Whipple, Morales and Hurley premiered five of the nocturnes. In 1996, during the debut of the complete set of the eleven nocturnes, Hurley was in a serious accident, and was unable to perform, so Whipple and Morales debuted the entire set without her, and later recorded the nocturnes in 1999 at the University of Miami. In 2002, the duo, Whipple, & Morales, released their first commercially available recording of Elemental Portraits. Between 2002 and 2004, the groundwork was laid for a premier performance of the collaboration which took place in Miami, Florida, during May of 2004. A live presentation featuring the spoken poetry and performances of the nocturnes which were performed at concert halls, universities, schools, and television studios throughout southwest Florida. We were featured artists on PBS/WLRN’s “ArtStreet” with Marilyn Porte, which aired in June, 2004.

To Whom it May Concern:
Enclosed please find:
Poems “Elemental Portraits”
by Maureen Hurley

First page of sheet music for each piece
by Kirk Whipple, composer
8035 SW 26th Street
Miami, FL 33155
pianistas2@aol.com
(305) 266-9673

CD Music recording
CD jacket & postcard flyer
of “Elemental Portraits:
Nocturnes for Two Pianos”
performed by Kirk Whipple
and Marilyn Morales, Duo Pianists

STATISTICAL STASIS

Well, it’s come to this:

flip a coin when stasis sets in.

John the Ambiguous was always 

a great one for a coin toss to decide fate

like to have a kid, break up, or to get married.

So whatever flummoxed him was always reduced to

a 50/50 chance, & the odds were always in his favor

because that way he didn't actually have to choose.

A good thing coins aren’t like dice cubes.

It would have increased the odds.

We were a gamble anyway.

9/29/04

rev 1/2/14

WITH THE PROGRAM

He’s been around so long 

he’s bypassed his own due date. 

He returns to his natal grounds, 

naming schools and streets. 

This hindsight into the past. 

We visit Frick junior high, 

were the dead across the street 

sometimes wander over 

from the cemetery to write 

a little poetry with us.

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

Permaculture, freewrite

That which shifts down into the substrate, is permaculture, soil, rocks and bones… What we’re not aware of is what defines us, it is our secret garden. What we do without knowing why we do or say it. Our secret harvest, what we take for granted. Sometimes permaculture gets separated from the source and we’re left wondering why this or that action was required, and for a moment we’re left outside our skins, as if having gotten up, dressed all wrong. Who remembers that first day of school. A reoccurring dream: I took off my red princess coat only to discover I was dressed in my underwear. I forgot to put on my outer clothing. The shame and humiliation was too much for a first grader to bear, defrocked and dethroned all at once. I was too young to know about, Freud or symbolism or dreams. But that was permaculture. Something in the frozen tundra of self, thawing, leaving us vulnerable and lost. But wait as I bend down to touch the lichen, a miniature garden with willows no higher than my thumb, tiny lingonberries and bogberries ripening under the summer sun, small, red eyes, sweet and tart on the tongue. Substrate permeating up into awareness, into loam. 

9/24/2004 Writers’ Group

The lake so smooth, not a report on the water, freewrite

Mornings were best, the drive to Sonoma State on backroads, I cherished beauty, the way the fog wrapped itself around the hills, like a bride‘s négligée with emu, feathers. And they would hug the hills, cling to them, so that the lake, so smooth, not a ripple on the water, was like glass. And the world was one vast mirror of hill, fog and sky.

It took me years to grasp what beauty was, having grown up inside of beauty, I had no eyes to see. I had to go away way in order to return. Prodigal beauty was a jail sentence. Me, peeking out from inside the word, holding the iron bars, wondering what all the fuss was about. 

But this lake, though man-made, reflects the fog and sky—beauty’s cnstant mirror, and I was a dust mote rising only to fall into that surface were sky in fog and water one thing—primordial—existing without my presence or witness. But beauty came dressed in fog to shroud the hills and the lake stood its ground, an eye of the sky watching me. 

A fish rises and mouths a speck, concentric ripples, spreading out, catching me and its stare. First day of fall.

9/24/2004 writers group. 

Letter to President Bush on Public Schools

In the National Mobilization for Great Public Schools petition box provided for personal comment I wrote:

Dear President Bush,

Having worked in nearly 100 California schools since 1979, I can emphatically state that the public schools have NEVER been in such dire straits as they are now, thanks to increased federal and state legislation that has negatively impacted our schools—coupled with a growing lack of state and federal funding. A deadly coctail for education. As a result, schools are seriously overcrowded. New legislation, including the futile "Leave no Child Left Behind" campaign, has left schools so crippled, that we've lost sight of what a school does: to educate children.

Public education is no longer about educating students but it's about crowd control, and it's about teachers jumping through meaningless administrative hoops in order to meet legislative mandates. A teacher's politically mandated curriculum teaching hours leaves little or no troom for actual meaningful teaching.

In addition, to become a credentialed teacher is now an expensive, time-consuming, meaninless pursuit, harbinger of things to come, namely, dealing with bloated school beaurocracy. Compound that with overcrowded classrooms, lack of funds for basic classroom needs, and poor salaries, no wonder new teachers are leaving the profession at alarming rates.

Thanks to government lip service, our children are becoming increasingly illiterate with little or no critical thinking skills, let alone, basic job skills—and they are America's future! Public education needs massive state and federal funding incentives ASAP to save the current generation from being left behind, because, Mr. Bush—and you are not  MY president: My president would give more than lip service to education, he would nake it a top priority.

Your lack of foresight and negative legislative actions have all but crippled what once was the best education system in the world. Sadly, these children are the victims you have left behind with your policies and they will be our future citizens of tomorrow. Alas, they will inherit this future.

Lesson Learned: Vote

If there was a lesson to be learned, the presidential election of 2000 taught us that every single vote literally counts. Some cast votes were counted incorrectly and some chads were pregnant, spawning an election where, several days after the polls closed, we still didn’t know who our president was. It proved to be a bad omen, and here we are, four years later, convincing friends to vote in 2004.

There’s a saying, Friends don’t let friends vote Republican. Here, in the Bay Area where, where the majority of voters are liberal, we’re preaching to the converted. But what about preaching furhter afield, what about family? What do you do then?

Like a dark secret, lately many of my liberal friends are confessing that their families are staunch Republicans. I have never before admitted in public that my enormous ecelctic, whacky family too is Republican to the bone. As in Orange County Republican. We have more than our fair share of laywers, judges, policement and doctors. 

At family gatherings, politics are always a hot subject. One of my earliest memories is of my grand uncles and aunts pounding the table, whiskey jars jumping in unison like amber soldiers. But you can’t divorce an entire family. I tried that for a few decades but it only isolated me from my roots. I mourn those lost years of self imposed exile when many of my relatives died.

There’s a popular anti-Republican joke set in the Midwest, where a Republican teacher asks a class to raise their hands if they’re Republican. The whole class raises their hands except a lone student, Mary, dissents. She claims that she’s a Democrat by virtue of the fact that both her parents are Democrats.

You wouldn’t find me raising my hand in that classroom either though I’m from a family where both my parents are Republicans. And their parents were Republicans. And that’s about as far back as it goes. Most of us are newly arrived to this continent.

And when I don’t know which way to go, I flip a coin, freewrite (photo)

Yes, it’s come to this, flip a coin when stasis sets in. John the Ambiguous was always a great one for a coin toss. Have a kid, get married, whatever impasse flummoxed him was reduced to a 50-50 chance. 

A good thing that coins aren’t built like dice to increase the odds. Otherwise, we’d be all day setting up the parameters and permutations for radical changes in life. Or not. So once we were at Casa Bombeck in Chiapas, he flipped a coin either we go to the Lacondon, jungle, or, the Mayen village of Chamula. We chose our coins carefully. The Quetzalcoatl head came up on the antique five peso coin. Feathered serpent grinning at our feet. 

And so we rode green horses into the jungle, to the village in deep in the San Cristobál Mountains where gringos were still an anomaly. When I showed him the coin, the old man at the Mayan church took a shine to me, it must’ve been the aguardiente he was sipping—for strictly religious purposes. 

He gave us a personal tour of the church, which was once Catholic and the floor was strewn with pine needles. Their sweet smell unreproducible with chemical scent, the rafters draped with bolts of calico cloth, and all around the walls was an army of obscure saints all wearing smoking mirrors on their chest so that a worshiper saw themselves in the saint’s image. Self affirming. I recognized a few of the saints, but saw my face blazing on the pectoral mirror of each one.

The old man set up a small portable altar on a shoe shine box with Coca-Cola, copal and aguardiente. I put the Quetzalcoatl coin on the altar and he was pleased. We had somehow broken through the culture and language barrier. By that action, none of us having any language in common, other than the language of the oppression between us. All of this came down to a toss of the coin. The ringing sound of destiny on the floor. We never know what the wish was, or what it offered up.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Up with the chickens, freewrite

Rising with the chickens is not exactly my cup of tea, nor is it within my parameters unless the night is long, and the craic is good and and the idea of bed is but a distant thought. Of course, when the moon is full, it tends to confuse the chickens who will cluck all night long, and lay eggs under the moonlight. The roosters are plum-tuckered out by daybreak, having nailed everything in sight for the past 24 hours. They stand on the fence and beat their wings, but can only manager rough croak, more like a toad than a fowl.

I met a Scottish dancer at the Clan Gun banquet who is studying avian science, nothing exotic like herons or snow snow egrets, but poultry science. She said she loves chickens. I like them fried and baked, barbecued, fricasseed, but not live beneath my window at night during a full moon. They nice enough to look at nestled in the trees weather in Key West where there’s a wild wayward chicken for every resident, or the wild jungle fowl that roam the streets on the backside of Kauai’i. With their brilliant feathers  they’re like exotic ornaments. I’m reminded that chickens came from China, so it is said, but it must’ve been a long time ago by way of the silk road because they’re central to so many cultures whether Roman, Celtic, or Mayan.

Once I had to take care of the neighbor’s chickens, we began with 40 chickens. but as the days passed, the flock grew smaller and smaller. The sly fox in the henhouse, such a cliché. It could’ve been a raccoon, I suppose. One moonlit night he polished off half the flock. The neighbors were distressed, having named all 40 of them. And when they returned home, they were only nine chickens left out of 40.

We always wanted to hypnotize the chickens, draw a circle and put their beak in the center, or flip them upside down and stroke their bellies—but catching them was the biggest challenge. We weren’t up to when they were all nearly as big as we were, and were not above chasing us or the dogs. Come daylight, they were fierce as tigers, but in the darkness they were sitting ducks.

Me, I liked slipping my hand beneath their feathers, to feel that promise and weight of eggs, warm to the touch, some eggs were the color of moonlight and others, the color of the sky, and some were speckled as if strewn with shade but the egg timer went off and that’s the end of this freewrite.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

Wandering the backstreets, freewrite

Wandering the unfamiliar backstreets I find the path always goes forward. I find forgotten pieces of myself in the alleyways, on those secret paths etched by children and pets—they go with impunity to places where grownups fear to tread. Like a jewel, memory is triggered by a particular bend in the road, a certain slant of sunlight, kindled by the odor of a season. 

The way the sun struck my face. I analyzed it—hot, humid, like spring, but fuller with a promise of harvest—that rich heat similar to spring, but more laden. Indian Summer coats the skin with humidity. We’re not used to it here on this coast. Florida, maybe. And I am transported back by the dappled light, myriad sun circles spread on the ground like small vanilla wafers.

The old cat wanders by, sniffing each circle as if it were elegible for treasure. He stops, sniffs, with mouth slightly ajar—flehmen. It’s as if he too were transported by memory, having taken the backroad himself. We bask in the late afternoon sun. His dark coat lies flat, full of static electricity, sparks flying under my hand, but the sun outshines the light of his fur during these long drawn out dog days of Summer.

8/27/2004 Writers' Group

Pulses (prose poem) (Why did Google flag this blog entry as a server redirect error again?)

The old one bent over the fire feeding the pulses, one at a time into the cooking pot. End of summer, and the green beans that bolted and grew towards the sun in the hopes that the great beanstalk in the sky would find them a ladder to the heavens, were unceremoniously shucked, their corns tossed into the stew pot for the evening meal. This evening, the next—it didn't matter. It all wound up in the same place eventually, thought the old woman. Her gray hair hung down in thin ropes, like bedraggled feathers. Soon she too would go the way of all things. The fire popped and hissed. She watched the film rise from a crack in the wet wood. Stranded bugs did a frenzied dance on the rotted log she'd used for starter wood. She marveled at their amethyst color, so like the bauble of the Chieftain, who was always yammering on about his own self importance. The hot bugs curled into tight balls, and rolled off right into the coals like berserker warriors leaping into the fray. She was still puzzling over last winter's tale about a dragon, his mother, and the dragonslayer. Something about bears. No, that wasn't it, the warrior was more like a bear or a wolf. The last moon of summer rose over the new mown grain. the ache in her bones spoke of another story trapped in the silence of the earth. Soon the teller of tales would return to the village and pick up his tale where he left off. And, the beans, or their remains would turn up in the pot until they too dissolved into yesterday's stew, harboring the last of the summer sun in their skin. She hoped that this winter he would finish the tale so she could put the story to rest. But she worried that the dragon’s mother might be lying in wait for her during the longest nights.

8/24/04

Berkeley

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134th annual Scottish Highland Games approacheth

As Indian Summer approaches, we'll be roaming in the gloaming in kilts and gossamer gowns at the Caledonian Club's 134th annual Scottish Highland Games in Pleasanton this Labor Day Weekend—should anyone care to join us for any or all festivities.

There will be a royal pre-Game Pub Nights on Thurs., the 2nd (and most likely on Fri., the 3rd as well, I imagine); responsible revelers are staying over & slaying pints at the Pleasanton Holiday Inn. (Less crawling involved.) Main Street Brewery, opposite Pleasanton Hotel, north side of Main St. Around 7, Isla St. Clair, Piedmont Highlanders Pipe Band, dancers, fiddlers NON. Or just follow your ears and dust off your favorite mondegreens. (Forgo the Atkins Diet for the Monty Python greens and uisca diet).

Rumor has it Neil O'Neill, Himself, the Man so Nice They Named Him Twice, will sing a few national anthems to help open the Games on Saturday morning. We need YOU, a rousing, randy chorus for the unofficial Scottish National anthem. The words are pretty simple: you just pull your lips apart and yell "Who?" during the appropriate chorus. "....and stood against him.. WHO? Proud Edward's army..." (Longshanks, that is...) Qua? you might ask? Wallace fought against him. (see pix bellow)

So dust off your candent royal Stewart togas, paint your faces woad blue, warm the cockles of your, erm, your pipes, shoot your television, quaf a few brews or uisge beatha and see some real live action at the Games.

Beware, however, if someone asks you to stand in for the polish caber catcher. To go hunting for the wee lost haggis, you'll need a flashlight, extra batteries.

Oh and by the way, for you newbies, don't let your sporran dangle its participles. The sgian dubh is to be kept at all times in your knee socks. It's not a good idea to goosestep in a kilt either, for, as you know, nothing is worn under them (other than blue ribbons). Everything is in perfectly good working order. Or, it's a Loch Ness monster and it's waiting for you (or ewe, depending upon the Scot's particular, peculiar proclivities). However, though patent leather shoes for the lassies is perfectly acceptable, mirrors are definitely out.

Missive from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

It looks like we left the Florida Keys in the nick of time. We returned from the Dry Tortugas in the middle of a huge storm. Little did we know that it was a precursor to Hurricane Charley, (it must've been post-Hurricane Bonnie) and it was very impressive. 

We had wild indigo seas for most of the 70 miles to the Dry Tortugas, and strange, calm, green, glassy seas as we returned to Key West. Flying fish, sea turtles, and sea birds were all riled up—even a suicidal amberjack tried to land in my arms as I stood at the bow of the ship like a masthead in order to avoid all the poor wretches retching all over the place inside the cabin.

As for Hurricane Charley, this morning, the eye of the storm passed over Fort Jefferson, situated on an atoll, some 22 acres barely above sea level, with blustery 125 MPH winds, after wreaking havoc last night in Havana where it made landfall.

Fort Jefferson's sixteen million bricks, myriad arches laid by Irish workers over 150 years ago, how will they hold up in the eye of the storm? The tiny drainage channels in Dr. Mudd's cell, the man who tended John Wilkes Booth, useless in this rain. The moat, a frail buffer against rising seas. 

Letter from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

Kirk y Mari,

Fort Jefferson was mindblowing; 70 miles of sea, the last third of the journey was rough, open seas, with 2-4 foot swells, the sea changing from green to turquoise to indigo to black as a squall hit. I kept thinking of those Cubans fleeing the island in little more than rafts. 

We were going 26 knots (30 MPH) and it took 2.5 hours each way. A raft, at the mercy of the tides & wind would take forever. Hemomgway was strandede here for 17 days, they fashioned a raft to get back to Key West. You could tell when the water got deep (aside from color) when the lobster pot floats disappeared, there were thousands of them, everyone going nuts on opening day of the season.

Anyway, you can also fly here, maybe a saner option, and avoid getting seasick. But you don't get to spend as much time here. Next time I'd skip the dolorous fort tour & head for the water ASAP. We didn't get any quality snorkeling in as the storms hit, and lightning & H2O don't mix. 

We did get some time in when the storm blew over but it wasn't sunny, and so we didn't get to see the colors. We got to see jumping conchs though! Who knew they could jump on their bright orange pseudo foot? And here I thought they were sedentary stationary objects. Not.

You know, I absolutely HATE Duval Street after dark! It's LOUD, with bad musicians blaring from every door. Neil didn't play any gigs after all, Open Mic is on Wed nights, and everything is sewed up tighter than a tick anyway.

We'll see you all sometime this late aft./eve. We want to see Susan first after her class at 3:30 to say goodbye. It's a long drive from Key West to Key Largo.

Besos y abrazos, M&N

• Hurricane Charley, Mile Zero, Highway One (photos)
• Confessions of an iPod Roadie
• Letter from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal
• Missive from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

Letter to Sigrun in Iceland (Helgar the Horrible)

Icelandic Horses in the rain mic@vikinghorse.freeserve.co.uk
Sigrun,

Alas I have no photos of Helgar the Horrible, who by this time is probably in Icelandic horse heaven! He was a gelding, not a stallion. I suspect that's why he was allowed to come to the US in the first place, no danger of gene pool problems.

He was unusual, some of his behavior was unlike that horses. Closer to pony or donkey behavior. Unlike the donkeys, he was not revengeful & didn't carry a grudge. BUT you never knew quite what to expect from him. He wasn't as wily as the Shetlands. Boy was he sometimes thick-headed: both metaphorically & literally! He once tried to take me right through a water tank. Guess physics wasn't his strong point... We never quite knew what made him tick. He was pretty enigmatic. Sometimes his brakes didn't work right so we never knew what to expect....

He was surefooted...except whenever he had a momentary lapse with physics, that is. He never needed shoeing, his hard hooves were like flint. You could ride him all day long and he never would tire, no matter how steep the mountain, and believe me, we rode hard. We took our assorted ponies, horses, donkeys and an occasional lonesome stunted (dwarf) bull calf named Mr. Smitts out for miles over the steep coastal ridges of Marin County, Northern California, as far as Point Reyes national seashore, and Bolinas (from Forest Knolls)... (we called the bull calf that because he was smitten by our Shetland ponies, and didn't know he was a bovine... which was downright embarrassing in the spring when his hormones began to run... he'd hop up right behind me, and the danger of being impaled in the back by his horns was...but I digress.)

ONE'S SULLEN CRAFT

It was fair great meeting in the Marin (F)art & Garden parking lot even if your are the landlord in the Seagull and Anna is nowhere to be found because you've eaten all the apricots in the tree like thieves in the night and what was left but unripe peaches and you know what kind of bellyaching ther'll be if we'd et those and the bird has flown while we searched for Chekov's cherry trees--and how many times did he rewrite it? A lesson to persevere one's sullen craft.

EGRETS FOR SINEAD

Where the sun is shining, and the sky is that incredible cerulean when you stare straight up at its infinite blueness, and you forget everything only to have an egret enroute to the lake cross your trajectory and you remember it's in the city after all: the distant pounding of surf, the cars on the freeway while I hold vigil for my cousin in hospital, a victim of that same stretch of road. With shaking hands, I made three silk scarves, the gutta forgiving. Roses, egrets, orchids, sky emerge from the void.

MAYDAY: HOLDING VIGIL FOR SINEAD

National Birthdays freewrite

By the dawn’s early light, we are counting syllables, and singing Anacretontic verse, odes to the battle of Baltimore. Bal-ti-mor my granny would say, parsing out the Irish word, the great house of Bel (not Bal), the god of fire. Bel, as in Belgrade, Beograd. No bears here, just the last fires of summer, approaching Lugnasadh and waiting for the fire hill signal on every hill, the signal to alight the Wicker Man’s annual burning—custom pre-dating the rocket’s red glare by several millennia. But everything follows what came before it. In this, nothing is original. They say the bombs bursting in air over the deserts of Baghdad were like an early Fourth of July. We celebrated the war on St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish community was up in arms, the holiday having been usurped, and sullied —his birthday? Who knows. But it became that after the poet died. What so proudly we hail. Where do we all hail from? My brain is on fire at the twilight’s last gleaming beneath a full moon, a blue moon—to herald in the birth of a nation with all its bigotry and glory, Cassandra-faced and blind, smiling with false grace to the new dawn. Call it Fahrenheit, 911.

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group

Blue Moon, Broken Chad freewrite

Wide-open, anything: blue moons in July, birthdays of good friends, of a nation, out of Iraq, Saddam’s continued arrogance, Bush’s too. Speaking of broken chads, they even have a name for it, Chad. And Bush is Bible beating the south into submission, seeking parishioners to vote. It’s going to be that kind of close. Anything to do with conflict of interest? It took an act of Congress to put God into the Pledge of Allegiance, the dollar bill, and into the national anthem, which was once a drinking tune called Anacreon. The original subject: makes love, not war. Anacreon was a poet of Greece who fled fromCyrus the Great. I envisioned that he fled to Thrace, because he, like Homer was no fighter. He flung down his sword and shield and fled to live in another day. Many other days in the courts of Polycrates. He lived so long that Heradotus, who was forever trying to stick one foot into the same river twice, commented upon it. 85 years! A marvel. But Pliney (the Elder?) says he choked on a grape stone. Grape stone? Cherry stone? Pits? Chads? The chad of the grape, voting for vino, no fish here, just wine, and women and song. But that’s how it was, pleasing the despots and tyrants, give them what they want. Nubile maidens and lads and popped cherries. That’s what Anacreon lived to write another day for, and then Thomas Moore translated him, a song written to Anacreon, time traveling across the centuries to settle in and find a new home. Oh say, can you see? As the rosy-fingered dawn rises to the rocket’s red glare….

7/2/2004 Writers’ Group

Eugene Ruggles 1935 - 2004 (photo)

Gene Ruggles  and Shirley Kaufman in Petaluma

Gene Ruggles was an old friend of my mom's from North Beach. My mom, she got around, sometimes she'd bring her City friends home to meet my grannie and me in Forest Knolls. Gene Ruggles and my grannie got on like a house afire. She would make Irish sodabread and brew a pot of strong tea liberally laced with Irish whiskey, which she kept hidden in the bedroom closet, for Gene.

They'd talk of things Irish and politics until the sun slipped behind Mt Barnabe to bathe in the ocean. Then, when the stars studded the sky, my mother and Gene would stagger down Arroyo Road, half-lit, to Sir Francis Drake Blvd. more than a mile away, and hitch back to the mysterious City. Sometimes I wonder what they talked about as they wandered down that dark country road to civilization.

TYGER, TYGER

TYGER, TYGER

The moon’s tears splashed into the ink dark lake,
a harvest of light rippling the sky
She leans down, offers it up to the stars.
They say Ithuriel’s spears watered heaven with his tears.
They say Blake saw God in an apple tree when he was four.
He spent the rest of his life looking up in the orchards
But God was busy saving Ireland, the land of saints and poets.
And the fey world fled with their celestial constellations in tow
to take root in Blake’s orchard. The apple fell far from the tree
and flourished in Avalon, Anglesey, the Isle of apples.
Amid the oak groves, druids climbed towards the sky
harvesting mistletoe with golden scythes under an equinox moon
But this island was their last stand, their last resting place
Before the Romans drove them underground for good.
They became fossil stars trapped beneath the skin of the earth.

6/04, 9/08

Oh what a beautiful morning freewrite

Sigh, I’d like to think everything‘s going my way, like in the song, but sometimes it all feels so hard, so futile. Last night I slam-dunked the book on women’s depression. I didn’t seem to fit the major categories, but I answered six of the 10 warning signposts, which, according to the author, puts me in the definitely depressed camp. Let’s see: am I in the major league or the minor league? 

With self-help books, the bases are always loading, and it’s always spring training camp at the box office—as we are a nation that legislate happiness for all—indivisible, even. We are so preoccupied with our own petty unhappinesses, it’s a national pastime. There is an entire section dedicated to self-help in the bookstore. Instead of being positive, we are perennially positive that something must be wrong, and we’re on the verge of either going into, or coming out of depression. We are all hanging 10 on the stasis shelf of unhappiness. Personally, I view it as an indulgence of extreme self narcissism. 

And then I thought of how we live in such uncertain times—ever since 9/11, our collective perception has changed, to say that of the middle ages milieu, or should I say, mayhem as 3/4 of Europe died of the plague, and if not the plague, then the crusades polished them off. It’s a wonder that we were able to re-populate and replace ourselves as it were. Obviously, the survivors did not live a monastic life, they were like the newly introduced rabbits, populating themselves to kingdom come. After all, someone had to fill the churches of Christendom, lest the infidels sweep across the steppes in the footsteps of Genghis Khan. 

Today Neil asked one of his students to play Maria in West Side Story, the Juliet scene, and she said oh no, not me I am too cold. She was the niece of the president of Afghanistan, and she said if that scene were to happen in my country, if some Romeo snuck into my courtyard, I would’ve been beheaded. She said so matter-of-factly, that she could no longer react. She felt nothing at all no depression, no reprehension or horror as she views us as the infidel in this country, where happiness and justice are legislated for all, but not from within the war zone.

6/4/2004 Writers’ Group

If. Whatever's burning up your mind, freewrite (Merrill Gardens journal)

And so they asked me, it was my turn, and I had asked them to ponder on "if." A hypothetical question, but also a loaded statement in a rest home. Especially when asked if you had to live your life over. By asking them probing questions, I was asking them to not only to delve into the past, but also to share their souls with each other. 

Many of these folks had lived together for years and still didn't know each other's life stories. I thought, these were the lucky ones, the ones who lived charmed lives, an ambassador, a designer, a concert pianist, and an organizer. What emerged, was that each, thinking the others life was more glamorous than their own lives. Envy. 

One person chose to say her life was perfect. She was content. Another devalued her life experiences. We all gave her a mouthpiece. And another added her story to the collective invisible pile, as if the laundry of the soul was laid out to dry on the breakfast table. 

Then it was my turn. They called in the chips, and here I was, 3 to 4 decade younger than there, feeling valueless and fragile and the Oldsters were telling me that I still had plenty of time left. But I was not convinced. 

Madeline Bedal from Montana, who took just turned 91 wasn't with us. I miss her terribly, as she is my touchstone for the residency. She, who was a kindergarten teacher, who became legally blind, who thought she had nothing of value to contribute, told us extraordinary stories of her pioneer childhood, enthralled us.

I savored those bittersweet precious moments as we made plans for the future, knowing that nothing is really certain, not even the next time that we will meet. And we met fully in the moment and made plans anyway. These senior citizens and I are sharing our life stories. I told them that it felt like I had a roomful of grandparents, and they all smiled and laughed. We reaffirmed each other's existence.

Enroute to the senior center Alene (?) and I pass the scene of an accident, a young man being lifted up on a gurney all cerulean and blue, the colors of the sky. His car looked like in overturned beetle. An SUV had run right over it. I wondered would he make it.

I couldn't help but think of my cousin Sinead emerging from her own darkness, thankfully oblivious to her ordeal, her memory having been wiped clean, her slate blank, so that she couldn't bear witness to the darkness that she had experienced. She fought back. She fought back the darkness, not ready yet. She  began to remember and she raged and raged against the dying of the light. She did did not plant go gentle at that junction of "if."

6/4/2004 Writers' Group

• In the rain without an umbrella, freewrite
• Madeline Stannard Bedal Chapbook
• Della Madeline Stannard Bedal obituary
• EGRETS FOR SINEAD

Elemental Portraits with Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales on ArtStreet

I performed my poems based on Elemental Portraits with composer-musicians Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales on ArtStreet, with Meredith Porte, PBS TV, WLRN, South Florida. We also performed at Florida State University

Photos by Kirk Whipple

Elemental Portraits Reading, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and Santa Rosa, Maureen Hurley, Kirk Whipple, Marilyn Morales 3/7/2014 
Kirk Whipple, Marilyn Morales, with special guests...

Elemental Portraits Performance, Maureen Hurley, Kirk Whipple and Marilyn Morales Cape Cod  
ELEMENTAL PORTRAITS: NOCTURNES FOR TWO PIANOS 20 poems

added 4/24/2016

• Hurricane Charley, Mile Zero, Highway One (photos)
• Confessions of an iPod Roadie
• Letter from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal
• Missive from Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas, journal

Elemental Portraits handbill

ELEMENTAL PORTRAITS: NOCTURNES FOR TWO PIANOS 20 poems

ELEMENTAL PORTRAITS: 
NOCTURNES FOR TWO PIANOS
Musical compositions by Kirk Whipple
Poems by Maureen Hurley
A collaboration of music & poetry

Maureen Hurley’s poems were inspired by the two-piano compositions by Kirk Whipple. They collaborated during the creation of the music. Poems & musical selections are copyrighted & may only be downloaded for personal use. They may not be sold, licensed or used without written consent of copyright holders. © The Unconservatory

§

Prelude: Undressing The Muse

Overture: Collage Nocturnes

Kozal Long: Sunset At Ilsanjo  
 (entire piece: mp3 format).

ilá: Deep Ocean Wave

Virginia: The Steady Flame

Uncle Al’s Cloudscape

For The Two Of Us

Michelle: A Patriot’s Dream

Helen: Tanzania Dresságe

Pablo: A Party Of One!

Katie: The Nightingale 
Randy: Neon Rain

Joe: Sunrise At Occidental

Coda: Elemental Portraits

ELEMENTAL PORTRAITS notes to recycle

ELEMENTAL lines to recycle 

Housesitting for Shiva — prose v. freewrite

I awoke in a strange house, in Atchison Village, in Richmond, CA, to the sound of someone walking on the roof. I awoke to am empty house and a strange garden where the night before, I had been introduced to all the roses name by name, the owners having left me a carefully plotted map with precise watering schedules and soaking instructions for tender new roses versus the long established roses. But they left me no information that the electricians were coming in the morning. Or the name of the cat or that the mail needs to be let in once a day too.

An electrician let himself in by the front door at dawn, looking for the fuse box. I thought the house was being robbed. I lunged for the phone. No dial tone. He didn't look like a thief but he came to rob the electricity from the house. His eyes were like St. Elmo's fire against skin the color of shadows.

Luckily I was dressed, I'd fallen asleep watching TV on the couch. Sleep came in limbo in a strange house. He was as surprised as I was. He informed me in a lilting accent that there will be no power this morning. Tthis means no morning tea, no computer. Only the garden, the cat, and my notebook for company.

Yesterday’s record heat wave threw the watering schedule asunder. The northern sky was lonesome for the tropics. It paled and flashed and whined with longing. St. Kitts, said the other electrician, that's my home. My island. Are you far from home? he asked. Being from far away, the island man assumed everybody was from somewhere else.

I was all tangled up in answers, should I say where I was born, where I was raised, where I’ve lived, versus where I live now or where I would want to live in a parallel universe and why I can’t seem to answer the question? All I could think of was the color of the sea on tropical reefs. Turquoise longing versus the prison of our steel slate gray bay.

Incongrously, I began humming an old Holly Near/Ronnie Gilbert song to Steven Biko as I fed the cat who was furiously weaving figure eight shackles around my ankles and I remembered the cat's name was something like Biko. God, I hadn't thought of that song in 20 years. The cat didn't care what I called her as long as I give her full measure of kibble (and then some) plus equal petting time. Gurumai and Baba and all the bodhisatvas stared at me from photos and niches on every wall, the mantra eternally whining like a famished mosquito on the CD set to replay until infinity or the next power shortage, was mercifully silent.

We think in terms of color, I was defining my morning in pantone scale. The roses were like florid schools of fish. Circe the nymph, shared a plot with Just Joy. Mme Lombard was in bed with Tolouse Lautrec and you know what that leads to. Alliance de Franco Russe was next to the quartet: Peace Rose, Gloire & Eglantine, and Mrs Choux, but Aloha was off sulking all by herself in a corner. No island welcome there.

I found Charles de Gaulle tangling in the same heady bed with the Tipsy Imperial Concubine. An international scandal. Leaves and branches entwined. I imagined a collective lovers knot of rose roots under the rich loam. I followed the hand drawn map, watering each rose for exactly five minutes, avoiding downed power lines suspended from the pole by yellow lines tied to the roof. It was as if the house was a boat anchored to a mooring line, snug in a harbor of crabgrass sea.

When the watering was done and it came time to pick some roses for my class, I forgot the eminent danger of water lines and high voltage lines intersecting, though the hose and extension cords were crossed in fated lovers’ knots. I forgot the possibility of electrocution greeting me by traveling up a silver highway of water to the hose, will my rubber and wooden shoes save me?

Should the lines cross, and the electricity arc, then I stood at the intersection of an improbable death. As I picked roses, I forgot all about my plans to run away from the trajectory of power line and the yellow rope, should it break. My plans to avoid imagined deaths was dismantled as I flitted from bloom to bloom like a drunken bee with shears in hand, gathering heaps of roses of every description, color and name.

There were nearly 150 varieties of roses to tantalize and entrance, their heady odor, narcotic. I was like the cat, stoned, staggering from each imagined heaven to another, oblivious to the ghettoed and armed hordes of Richmond's Iron Triangle, death capitol of the world, gathered around cars right outside the fence, with rap music vibrating car windows like a gale against sail lines. Doin' coke lines on the hood. Watching us watching them through the iron bars.

Who is locked in, us or them? San Quentin in the distance, shining like a reverse Mecca. The holy sepulcur of baddies. Worse than Al Capone's Alcatraz, holding thriller memory for the tourists. I felt a lasso of premonition and dread circle and tighten around my heart and nothing eased that pain. The power was out but I could still hear the om mantra chant from the dead CD player.

I was distracted, the house gave off an electric moan, as if testing the anchor rope mooring. I was thinking of rescue ships in the night. I recited, bowline, jib line, I chanted another line until I got to the radishes with their rosy-spanked bottoms peeking sediciously out of green petticoats. I liberally doused them until their leaves became slender green fins in the mulch. I tried not to think of orphan stray bullets that have planted themselves in the gardens, in the walls of this historic Rosie the Riveter village surrounded by railroad yards, Chevron tanks, and urban ghetto.

Sometimes I still dream an old lover comes in the night to put his arms around me. Last night I played succubus to his incubus, and opened like a rose, only to awaken to a confused history of decades slipping upstream, under the bridge of time, caught off guard, finding myself in sleep, unfaithful to my mate. The exponential dance of cumulative lovers had not corrupted that dance but old habits die hard, like all the rest.

In the infidelity of sleep, we are all infidels. Meanwhile, my cousin will turn up missing, victim of a hit an run on the Richmond Bridge, and I will find her registered as a Jane Doe at the NICU ward, in a coma, where I will begin to hold vigil and pray in earnest to any god that will listen that she will wake up whole. And the electricians, on island time, will forget to show up and the refrigerator will thaw and christen toe floor to become a white island of rotted food surrounded by a baptismal moat of ice water.

2004 may

HOUSE-SITTING FOR SHIVA

HOUSE-SITTING FOR SHIVA

I wake to a strange house, someone walking on the roof.
I wake to the garden where I have been introduced to the roses by name,
the owners have left me a plotted map
with watering schedule and instructions for new roses
versus the established roses
but no information that the electricians are coming in the morning.
Or the name of the cat or that the mail needs to be let in once a day too.
An electrician lets himself in by the front door, looking for the fuse box
Luckily I’m dressed, but asleep on the couch, he’s as surprised as I am.
He tells me there will be no power, this means no morning tea, no computer.
Yesterday’s heat wave has thrown the schedule asunder.
The northern sky is lonesome for the tropics
St. Kitts, said the other electrician, my home,
Are you far from home? He asks.
I’m all tangled up in answers, do I say where I’m raised, where I’ve lived,
versus where I live now and why I can’t seem to answer the question?

We think in terns of color, the roses are florid schools of fish.
Circe the nymph, shares a plot with Just Joy,
Mme Lombard is next to Tolouse Lautrec
and Alliance de Franco Russe is next to the Peace rose
Gloire & Eglantine, Mrs Choux, and Aloha all by herself in a corner
I find Charles de Gaulle in the same bed with the Tipsy Imperial Concubine
I imagine a collective lovers knot of roses under the rich loam
I follow the map, watering each rose, avoiding down power lines
suspended from the pole by a yellow line tied to the roof—
as if the house were a boat anchored to a mooring line
snug in a harbor of crabgrass sea.
When the watering is done and it comes time to pick some roses for my class
I forget the eminent danger of water lines and high voltage lines intersecting
though the hose and extension cords are crossed in fated lovers’ knots
I forget the possibility of electrocution greeting me
by traveling up the silver highway of water to the hose, will it save me?
Should the lines cross, the intersection of an improbable death
I forget my plans to run away from the trajectory of the line
and the yellow rope, should it break
My plans to avoid imagined deaths are dismantled as I flit from bloom to bloom
with shears in hand gathering heaps of roses
of every description and name
nearly 150 varieties to tantalize and entrance
their heady odor, narcotic, I’m like the cat, stoned,
staggering from each imagined heaven to another
oblivious to the hordes gathered around cars
with rap vibrating the cars like a gale against sail lines
bowline, jib line, another line until I get to the radishes
with their rosy spanked bottoms peeking out of green petticoats
Sometimes I still dream he comes in the night to put his arms around me
I play succubus to his incubus, and open like a rose
only to awaken to a confused history of decades slipping upstream
under the bridge, catching me off guard
finding me in sleep unfaithful to my mate
the exponential dance of cumulative lovers has not corrupted that dance
but old habits die hard, like all the rest.
In the infidelity of sleep, we are all infidels.

2004

3 Hams at a Bread & Roses Party at the Nagy's

 Bread & Roses Party at Toby & Phil Nagy's, Piedmont, CA. Will Durst, Maureen Hurley & Michael Pritchard,  May, 2004?

Michael Pritchard Director to all three, all right take the joy of life thing down a bit you three. This is an artistic photo, same result can't help these faces they show years of laughs love and Bread & Roses compassion. Plus, of course, three hams. A hamilicious photo!

July 3, 2012 at 5:27am 

Maureen Hurley I need to find the original of this photo and see if I can make a better print—this is a terrible copy—from when digital was in its infancy. I've been saving it all these years to send to you but in those days you didn't even do email, O great gorilla-fingered one! Welcome to the digital age. And Facebook, no less!

added 4/24/2016

CPITS poetry readings at Barnes & Noble, in Fremont

Apr 20 at 6:30 pm
Parkmont Elementary
Poetry Reading

Join us for a wonderful evening of poetry reading by 3rd Graders from Parkmont Elementary.  Tonight will also celebrate the release of an anthology of the students poetry by the California  Poets In The Schools.

Wednesday, Apr 28 at 7:30 pm
Reading: Poet-Teacher 

Reading & Announcement of Contest Winners

The following local poets and authors from California Poets In The Schools: Maureen Hurley, Tobey Kaplan, Lindsay Knisely, Tureeda Mikell, Kristin Palm, Mara Sheade, and John Oliver Simon will be reading from their works. We will also be announcing the winners from our Adult Poetry Contest and listening to a reading of the winning poetry.

The tipsy imperial concubine, freewrite

Shiva says it’s a peony, or maybe a rose… Must be from the same strain as Mrs. Slattery, or whatever the rose is called—the one where the wife ran off with a chauffeur? The idea being that there’s more to roses than meets the eye. All that infidelity. All those voluminous skirts and petticoats thrust skyward, full blown blooms on their backs, as it were, and her living in a brothel, says Shiva. Who is she referring to? Mrs. Slattery? Or the imperial concubine? She has to wear earplugs at night, and even the slatternly cat is cutting around, it seems. Is that why they love to step up and smelling the roses? It’s all a bit of Nirvana on the side. The cat has her nose up the arse of the imperial concubine, sniffing with mouth half open, glazed eyes at half mast. Who says they don’t have a sense of smell or a sense of aesthetics? Any old rose won’t do. Something exotic to get tipsy over, the cat knows the finer things in life… A rose is not just a rose, when concubines are involved, or chauffeurs for that matter. I always thought the magnolia blooms were like large white knickers voluminous as Mary Bianchi‘s vast acreage. On Monday mornings, we’d see them hanging out on the line in the orchard, like large white flags. It was a good thing they weren’t red, or they would be capes to play toreador. Each spring, she’d let the calves out to mow down the weeds, Holstein heifers as black and white white as your knickers, and the wind blowing in. They’d gaze at us vacuously with their soft, brown eyes. They were concubines in training, thigh deep in all that lush green grass, imperially lowering their heads with a shake, tipsy amidst all that green—these captive ladies munched amid a flurry of petals. Heifers with their tight packed little udders, not yet ready to serve the emperor of ice cream.

4/23/2004 Writers’ Group

A lone, sheep, thinking, she’d have to clear the hillside all by herself, freewrite

They put her out to pasture and forgot all about her. Tall grass towering over her shoulder. And when the rains came, she was like a huge sponge, staggering up to the fenceline looking for her lost kin. She was suffering from an identity crisis, with a none of her own nearby to comfort her. Not even a bleat. She gazed forlornly at nothing in particular. She had a job, she was on loan, they expected her to clear the hillside all by herself, a lone, sheep. Clearly they don’t know about spring bloat, my great-grandfather had to plunge an ice pick into their guts to let the gasses out when they overate. She got down to the business at hand, thoroughly cropping the tender grasses down to the roots, not knowing this is why cattle ranchers hated the arrival of her kind, her ancestors triggering range wars. She had no upper teeth and could crop the grasses right down to the roots on the fragile prairies. Erosion soon followed. The native grasses were unable to withstand such close scrutiny. There is so little left of our native grasses and plants, gardens pruned and tended with exotic imports. Like the sheep and the cow, there are is a little room for native species. Yet we don’t have a shortage of deer. And we continue to plant houses like flocks of abandoned sheep, cropping down the grasses so that the foreign British lawns may grow. The sheep doesn’t care whether it’s a fine lawn or a rough pasture. She industriously nibbles, shaking clods of dirt from the roots, edging her way up the hillside with her eye ever on the horizon. Desperate for kindred creatures, and she sidles up to two llamas haughtily looking down their long noses at her as if she were beneath contempt. Maybe she should consider another career, perhaps writing. I think I shall call her Flannelly O’Connor.

 4/22/2004 Writers‘ Group