Alternator Blues Coyote

After teaching Fri. at Alexander Valley School, the new-to-me Nissan's alternator died on the freeway in the rain at dusk, in Cotati, and I was miles from either home...I had to literally rely upon the kindness of strangers (I was Blanche(d) alright!!! with fear)...

Filling up at the gas station, I spotted a stranger wearing a Harley cap, named Jim O'Hara (I knew I was in good hands: he looked like my cousin, luck of the Irish) after an ordeal, Jim got me headed toward home (Tara? Was I Scarlet?) with a new Kragen battery and an admonition: "don't use anything electrical" and I got to my cabin in Forestville some 25 miles away, using the wipers only when I couldn't see anymore...I couldn't make it back to Oakland (an hour) with the headlights on.

The Kragen guy said I could go maybe 20 miles on a battery & no alternator...and of course my car has ALL the idiot lights (all using up precious electricity).

Anyway, after numerous phonecall, and "hold please", I located the part I needed on Sat. from Smothers, and a neighbor mechanic put it in, but everything I earned the last two Fridays and all my emergency wallet money ($100 bill) was spent on the "free" car.

I think my mad careening around with Coyote the other night (see below) sent an already fragile alternator over the edge. So that's why the engine light was on... of course, being an idiot light, it didn't specify that the alternator was bad...

What a night. I need a cell phone.
Still reeling (in Oakland at present...)

COYOTE PANDEMONIUM

FOUND POEM lists —aphohorism chain poem

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link

A rolling stone gathers no moss

After the storm comes the calm

All aren't hunters that blow the horn

As green as grass

As is the gardener so is the garden

As you sow, so shall you reap

Better to go back than go wrong

By hook or by crook

Deeds are fruits, words are but leaves.

3/12/04

boisterous bastard conception

tonsillitis 

obsessive blight

apprehension

immemorial  glamor

pedagogic rune 

build synthesis

spark rabble overture

azalea thaw

darwin colosseum

sumerian  

diminutive pitilessly

sharecrop utopia  

nonetheless   

blend appetite rot

besiege bacterium hour

cypriot diesel

affluent  crescent

secondhand dessicate shop

abdomen dirt company

forestry africa

BLOOMSDAY BLUES

BLOOMSDAY BLUES

Thalatta, thalatta, the sea, the sea…

& Ulysses asleep, as I write with a pen, blue as thalassa. 

Thalatta, old sea, thalassa, new sea, both wine-dark. 

A drunken boat rocking, rocking, that slap and thunk.

As if a fist against a slab of meat… Industrious measuring, 

the blue eye on the prow plumbing the depths for signs of danger, for luck…

it’s all the same thing in the end. What sailors, what shore?

I write with a blue disco pen shedding blue light, 

a gift so beautiful I can hardly bear to write with it, 

I can barely contain myself. Homer was blind. 

What would purlblind Joyce have done with this distraction? 

The novelty of a pen lighting my words in the darkness…

I can’t wait to turn off the lights and see if my words, 

written in darkness, in knower’s ink, 

shed a different light when written thusly, 

will I find new metaphors at the end of the sentence?

And her lost sandal greeting the lip of Venus in the rosy-fingered dawn…

My hands, dyed woad from today’s art 

would be the same equation as darkness. 

I am mesmerized by color, traffic light amaze me, 

the green but not really green, teal blue, 

the color of epaulets of wild ducks 

and the red verging on magenta, 

venous blood from the inside of the wrist. 

And the yellow of the sun trapped behind glass.

These colors we use to invoke all other colors, 

to call them forth. Light, prisms, 

the edge of a broken bottle behind the hospital 

casting rainbows on the far wall.

Newton was right, light so amazing 

that he theosophized eloquent and the poets, 

when the saw what was possible, 

abandoned their dreary palette of words, 

drab browns and greys, and invoked color, 

pure prismatic color in their verse, 

liberating it from the mundane 

so that I may write this nonsense 

about the sea, the sea, 

all that blue uinleashed in this pen, 

it was a business gift from

one Japanese business man 

to another, to curry favor…

And Ulysses still sailing home 

heroically after all these years, 

Stephen Daedalus trading in his oars 

for tt’s taken from thalatta, for thalassa, 

having arrived in the 21st century 

a hundred years hence, the sea, 

Demotic Greek, the Olympiads 

returning home to Athens in time for the Games. 

Sea, sea and sky are one thing on the horizon. 

Look how Bloomsday approaches 

at the speed of sight.

3/12/04

(I know this says March but I suspect it was written in June, Bloomsday. Rescuing old bits of writing from the void—1/2/2014)

FOUND POEM

boisterous 

bastard conception

tonsillitis 

obsessive blight

apprehension

immemorial  glamor

pedagogic rune 

build synthesis

spark rabble overture

azalea thaw

darwin colosseum

sumerian  

diminutive pitilessly

sharecrop utopia  

nonetheless   

blend appetite rot

besiege bacterium hour

cypriot diesel

affluent  crescent

secondhand dessicate shop

abdomen dirt company

forestry africa

3/12/04

Moonlight Over Alexander Valley

I did a poetry lesson at the local school and silk after school, we did hoops for the annual spaghetti feed art auction that raises money for the school—and the arts program. It's so fun when everybody bids on these big barrels of wine... California's finest...and the wine flowed liberally indeed...at the Alexander Valley grange, at the foot of Mt St Helena, under a full moon, coyotes singing in the distance...after a dismal winter, hope returns in the tattered jackets of flowers by the roadside.

I passed the math(s) test! Something I've never beem able to do...I can't believe I had to wait until I was 51 to pass a math test! Only now is my mind ready...I too hated writing, didn't write at all until I was 30, then something happened...a dam burst, maybe it's because in art, I have no words, just color and light and shape.

At present, I am reorganizing my silk supplies...got a lot of stuff on Fri...I feel like King Midas recycling the gold gutta....actually I'm stalling/ procrastinating on my SPIN square...acaicias (wattles?) in bloom, and my eyes/nose(s!) running. welcome to spring.

When writing, write faster than you can think...it's usually better that way Besides the big censor kicks into overdrive if you give it the time. Me? I take no prisoners! I'm dyslexic so it's interesting, if not odd  that I write as well. I believe that with art as a basis, that one can learn, become proficient in writing. You already have the honed skills. Words are just a new kind of dye.

But hey, the  moonlight was incredible over Alexander Valley, coyotes serenading the full moon in a distant canyon, the daffodils nodding their heads in the Chinook breeze  (we plant them by the rural roadsides here for cancer victims, etc. It began as a fundraising campaign, a dollar a bulb, and now Marin and Sonoma County roadsides are ablaze with yellow. 

After 9/11, many people planted a bulb for each of the fallen. In our small church yard in Nicasio (think George Lucas territory), thousands of blooms nodding their heads in agreement.)  

I not only have math anxiety, but I have math rage...I get homicidal when I read some of the inane trick questions...and wonder what's the point of testing us? So many math questions are so poorly written and I have dyslexia and so I have to be ultra careful with the reading part. Then if my eye sees a number, it does strange computing—that has nothing to do with the problem. It's like I'm schizophrenic when it comes to math in that I have moments of lucidity, amid hours of confusion... (did you ever see Beautiful Mind with that gorgeous man, Russell Crowe?)

When it comes to math, I do absolutely nonsensical stupid mistakes ...though I understand how to solve them. Then the shytes who make these (teacher) tests, make up questions where they don't even want the answer, they want you to come up with another alternative (algebra) I mean who cares as long as you understand the problem and can solve it. 

I saw a (woman, thank god) math tutor who was fascinated by the way I solved problems...she said she was classically trained, and me, well, I circle as an artist does, from an oblique angle. (how's that for a rant???) Oops. I beg your pardon... Lately I've taken to cracking codes and dropping cyphers off in abandoned warehouses...(just kidding).

OK, so here's the burning question: so why does everyone refer to math in the plural, schizophrenia, royals, or because there are many forms of math(s)? Where is Pythagoras when you need him? I actually discovered I was good at and liked geometry...of course, we artists understand form/volume at the ground level, right?

Alas, the PO is closed now, so I'll send gorgeous rainbow colored pens out via carrier pigeon tomorrow!!!

IN ALEXANDER VALLEY

In Alexander Valley among the rows of vines,

the meadowfoam and saxifrage remember 

and pay homage to the earth and sky.

Always look forward, a span of time, an eon of time,

where each spring, they remind the sun of its color

and the precious vernal pools where individuality 

and ecosystems evolved to leave them 

lone sentinels of their species. 

They coexist in the fields where grape vines 

hold gnarled arms up to the sky in supplication—

or is it jubilation or communion? 

Whispering Et cum spíritu tuo /and also with you. 

The roots dig deep among the smooth stones, 

an ancient riverbed that softened its course with time, 

geology and the tilt of land, climatic change. Terrior.

They send roots down deep into the ancient aquifer, 

tainted with boron and mineral salts.

The blackbird drilling to a new warlord, the grape.

From the volcanic flush of the earth's core, 

plumes of sulfurous steam gush on Geyser Ridge

were they funnel upward into fog and mist. 

Truly a miracle, they turn alkali water into sweet wine 

and vineyards define each bucolic curve and cheek of land 

with geometric precision: we see the land with new eyes.

Come harvest season, we will raise a glass of wine 

to the sky—whether chardonnay, merlot, or meritage

on a slender porch, and note the mercurial green and red hints

as if the grapes had robbed pigment from the flowers in bloom. 

no date 2007? 

March 2004?

TO MOTHER EARTH

May you bring nature to us all
May the seconds pass by
like graceful birds
floating in the sky of you
May the birds build their nests
\in your bed of dreams
May you bring nature to us all.


no idea of date, found in May You poet teaching folder. Paper is somewhat yellowed, but not funky. sI'm ticking it in March 2004, but it could easily be1994 or 2014 for all I know.