Bio for anthologies

West Marin native who grew up on Coast Miwok lands, visual artist and poet, Maureen Hurley, is California Poets in the Schools Alameda County area coordinator, and former board member. She teaches poetry and art residencies in Bay Area schools, including Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, and Alexander Valley School where she has taught poetry to kids for more than 30 years.

Recipient of numerous California Arts Council artist in schools grants, and other arts teaching grants and awards including nominations for the Golden Bell Award, and the Kawasaki Award. She has taught arts programming to students of all ages throughout California and beyond—including Montana, the Bahamas, Mexico, and the former USSR.

Maureen Hurley is a photographer and poet whose work has been widely published in print and in electronic anthologies. She has won several awards for her writing, she was nominated for Sonoma County Poet Laureate, and has several Pushcart nominations. Her photos are featured in an upcoming documentary on Berkeley street poet, Julia Vinograd: Between Spirit & Stone.

Her recent poems have appeared in Spectrum; Fly Like the Clouds of Time; The Freedom of New Beginnings: Poems of Witness and Vision from Sonoma County, California; Memories of Southern California; California Fire and Water; Our Lady of the Avenue; and the US Air Force’s Literature and the Arts.

END OF YEAR WRITING STATS 2022

Needless to say, I’ve long since blown right past the 4000 blog entries entries mark where I began the year. It’s now closer to 4500 entries. Because of revisiting and recording old journal entries, and using Facebook Memories, I’ve managed to garner dozens of posts lifted from Facebook comments that I had not posted before in this blog. It’s interesting to realize many FB comments are often the nascent beginnings of a poem. 

For example last year, in mid-December, 2021, for example, I only had 125 posts, and then, because of Facebook Memories, I was able to add more posts. Call it found art. For 2021, I eventually tallied 170 posts—that’s nearly 50 more posts. I thought I was not going to break the 125 posts mark either for 2022, but suddenly a rush of poems gave me 181 posts, with 90 poems and 28 prose poems written. 

Now I will need to revise that figure because I went through my latest writing journal whwich I am about to retire, for lack of pages, with a fine tooth, comb, and pulled up 10 more prose poems and non-fiction, leaving me with a total of 190 posts for the year. Wowza. Considering I began this stats analysis post with 125 entries, I'm stoked. 

The Isle of Staffa

In 2008, we sailed by the isle of Staffa from the Iona to Mull ferry and I was dumbstruck by the beauty of all that columnar basalt dressed in lichen, moss, and sea spray. I wanted to jump off the deck of the small ferry boat. Of course there was no time to backtrack and visit the island. 

Ours was a mad overnight run from Oban, courtesy of a newfound friend who scored us coveted ferry tickets for locals on an overbooked ferry. Driving down Mull from the wee village of Craignure to catch the Iona ferry at Fionnphort, we were late late late, so we barreled down the one-lane road like banshees along the glaciated Ross of Mull which took my breath away, such ragged beauty. 

Iona was extraordinary, on my bucket list for ages, My Irish grandmother, who inspired me to visit Iona, often talked about Iona and Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young, in the same breath—it was a whirlwind visit replete with several missed ferries, no place to stay, last minute reprieve, but then, it was over, we had to leave that singular beauty. 

In the new moon’s arms

“The new moon in the old moons arms” was something my grandmother always said to me whenever there was a sliver moon in the sky. So, of course, I was an inveterate word thief, and used it in a poem. But Sir Patrick Spens was probably the first to say it in print. Or rather the ballad about him. After a poetry reading at Garbo’s in Guerneville, Jim Montrose once pointed that out to me, and of course I was shocked, thinking I had thought the metaphor up all by myself, being newly arrived to the floodgates of poetry… And of course, Coleridge mentioned it in ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.’  (That’s not marinara sauce!) Then it all fell into place. My grandmother used to quote long passages from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me when I was young. I was well steeped in the arms poetry, yet never knew it. 

REMEMBER

             —after Ron Padgett’s How to be Perfect

First, begin by getting out of bed earlier. 

No need to be a slug just because the pandemic is on. 

No excuses. We are not living in a bubble. 

It is important to get out 

of your nightclothes before 3 PM 

so that you have something to look forward to. 

Put a padlock on your bed if you have to.

Wash your bedding at least twice a month. 

No need to sleep like a man as my neighbor once said. 

Make sure you herd all those crumbs from the sheets. 

Don’t let them be like grains of sand at the beach. 

Speaking of beaches, when was the last time 

you actually went to the beach?

I mean really went to the beach, 

not a drive-by sighting, and got sand stuck 

in all those embarrassing nooks and crannies— 

like how are you did as a child, body surfing, 

impervious to the icy water. Why wait? 

There is only now.

Housesitting for KitaKat, journal

Because I was kitty sitting, I missed last Wednesdays, writing segment, I was too distracted, and besides, my pen was out of ink, and somehow, procrastination was my best friend. I thought that I would get back to it, but no. New house, new things to see. Oh look, shiny.

I also thought I would do all this scanning on memorabilia, so I hauled boxes of memorabilia down to Fremont with me. Nope. I didn’t have the focus. But I did read, or, rather, I tried to read a letter from Rosalind Sharpe Wall which mentioned the Cherry Foundation, dated 1986 and she had suggested that that I apply for money. And of course I never did.

Rosalind also mentioned that she was still working on her book that I helped to edit when she lived in Petaluma. It’s called Pioneers of of the Big Sur Coast, so that makes it a valuable letter to decipher as archival material, not that it said very much.

I expected to get back to my writing prompts next day, but it didn’t happen. What makes moving to a new location so distracting to the point of exhaustion? Here I am sleeping indoors these days. I’m not cold there’s central heating. I lack for nothing. I even have a kitty to pet.

Here’s the thing, for the first time in months, I’ve been sleeping indoors every night. Something I’m not used to. While I was sleeping outside during the fall, I was battling record cold temperatures. One night it got down to the high teens, all that cold sapped a lot of energy from me. As Sinead said, you’re in a warm dry place. enjoy it. True. So I caught up on a massive backlog of sleep deprivation that I didn’t know I had.

The town dog catcher

When I lived in Cotati, I lived next-door to the town dog catcher who kept wolves in his backyard. Moonlit nights, it was magical listening to them howl. Their pens stunk, all that raw meat. Like lion dung. I learned that you couldn’t look at the wolves, because staring directly into their mesmerizing yellow eyes was like looking too long at the sun, like moth to flame, because to see into their souls like that would be a challenge, and they’d bare their teeth lunge at the chain link fences, ready to rip your throat out. So I would sit on a step ladder and looked off to the side, watching them with my peripheral vision, and I listened to the wolves sing.

RECYCLE haiku

Thoughtful cat barfing
In her food bowl, saving it
For later. Repeat.

Cat regurgitates

breakfast in her food bowl

saving it for later.

 12/23

…..

Cat moons my zoom class, 

flashing her tail, covering 

the lens with her love.

Writing down the bones, 

she strokes the iPod, claiming

my words with her scent.

12/28

War, Literature & the Arts publication of War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima)

At last, my Nagasaki poem appeared in the War, Literature & the Arts, an international journal of the humanities / Volume 34 / 2022, from the US Air Force. It was a long birthing process: two and a half years to be exact. And somehow strangely fitting that the Fall issue was published on the winter solstice, the coming of light. 

I don’t publish very often. But this was a wait of epic proportions. First there was Covid, then the editor retired, then the website died, and the web hosting site died as well, so the entire WLA magazine had to be reconstructed from scratch—so this is a brand new website. Thank you, editor Thomas Maguire. Perseverance furthers.

“In 1989 WLA was launched as a simple collection of six essays examining the nexus of culture, conflict, and war. More than three decades later, WLA continues its exploration through a growing range of creative genres. Artists of all types share wars' jagged and fragmented horrors alongside its provocative and captivating narratives.” 

When colleague Jane Hirshfield began to teach poetry workshops on the East Coast, I asked her why she was teaching poetry to West Point cadets, and she said they need poetry more than ever. So I took a page out of her book and submitted this poem to the US Air Force Academy, never dreaming they would take my poem. what a great solstice gift, considering the source of the light. I am Shiva.

Featured poet, John Balaban, with whom I shared a publication credit in the 1995 anthology, Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the nuclear age, (his title poem, BTW), quoted WH Auden in his preface in WLA.

“The problem for a poet in writing about modern war is that, while he can only deal with events of which he has firsthand knowledge—invention, however imaginative, is bound to be fake—his poems must somehow transcend mere journalistic reportage.” 

Hopefully my poem transcends mere journalistic reportage.

Table of Contents and intro.

Maureen Hurley / War’s End (3 Days After Hiroshima) 

Here is my blog link with photo which they didn’t use.

At the last minute, I was asked to create an author’s note:

Author’s Note

Hurley’s uncles served in the army and navy; one built Liberty Ships at Marinship in Sausalito. Her father served in the Coast Guard, and a cousin, a mathematician, worked on the Manhattan Project. Her neighbor, a ship’s captain, was torpedoed in the Mekong Delta incident. She remembers ducking under her desk as atomic bombs were being detonated in Jackass Flats, NV. Her algebra teacher was Olympic runner and gold medalist Archie Williams, famed Tuskegee airman who trained fighter pilots.

These fragments of personal history inform her writing. Her poems have appeared in Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press, 1995), and myriad periodicals. Hurley was co-editor of Tracks in the Widest Orbit: Collected Poems of J. H. Montrose (Russian River Writers’ Guild, 1985). Montrose, a WWII pilot, shared his observations of the Bikini Island nuclear tests with Hurley, and he told her how he flew over Japan dropping leaflets warning them of the Hiroshima bombing. Maureen grew up piecing together fragments of war stories. Poet Jane Hirshfield, who taught poetry to cadets at West Point Military Academy, suggested she submit her poems to journals that address war and its consequences

AT THE OLD PETALUMA BANK

The old Petaluma bank, once an antique emporium 

and before that, a real estate office, and a film house,

cleaned and scrubbed, is now an eyeglass store

filled with pricy lenses, so that we can peer into the past. 

A man with a paunch wanders in, curious, clears his throat, 

sings a Christmas carol, the bank embraces his voice, 

but when he hits the high notes his trousers drop, 

and the embarrassed song wanders off, collides 

with the vault of the ceiling, that much closer to God.

12/17-/28

SECRET ACROSTIC

I am the south wind 

moving among the egrets of summer 

who rise up and across the sky 

only to return to the east wind 

where everything is possible, even truth.

12/15 my acrostic word is secret, embedded. For Ms. Kosmos’ class, Malcolm X ES

MoSt NYWC poetry prompts

MoSt New Year’s writing challenge poetry prompts 1-20 Below are extremely annotated versions of the writing prompts. Go to the Modesto-Stanislas webpage to get the full instructions and sample poems. Otherwise you can sign up here.

Guilty pleasures

I was eating chocolate layer cake late at night, eating from the mother log. Just me and the cake. No knives or plates involved. The tines of the fork furrowed the sides of the cake like a plowed field, lifting the loamy frosting from the geologic layers of cake. Sowing my calories, I took time to sample the ganache frosting, letting it melt on my tongue like a molten flood, slipping down my throat like a mudflow, until I gagged under the sheer weight of all that chocolate, trying to figure out how to savor it, and coordinate the breath, the breath that couldn’t blow out a bonfire of imaginary candles, too many to count. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow the cake across the table. Enter a memory, a photograph. I was one, and the cake in front of me was an island in time, taking me on a journey of no return. My starfish hands covered with frosting, my face black as night and my eyes filled with stars.

12/15 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

Mother Thread

Before you became a bird, when you were earthbound, but the sky taunted you with the low clouds of escaped sunsets murmuring of empty seas, whispering of sailor’s delights. My grandmother said you were never quiet of this realm, always wanting to get to the other side—of what, we never knew. Perhaps the beveled edges of a clouded mirror. When reality became corseted, you traipsed off to distant horizons, but still, the darkness found you out. I was but a child. I had no words for the places you went, the people you met on the littered streets, that place where the fringes of humanity called home. When I was older, sometimes our worlds collided, we found a common ground that became a conversational thread, a place where memory and experience was topstitched into a quilt of longing and regret. A single feather drifts down from the clouds to land at my feet like a small oarless boat adrift on an empty sea.

12/14 Write On! Susie Terence

SNOWGEESE

I only saw the wild snowgeese migration once, while heading towards Mount Lassen to cross-country ski. As we rounded the bend, I was astounded by the beauty of snowgeese filling a muscular sky laden with the promise of snow, and the thunderous explosion of wings as they circled and landed on the molten gray mirror of an alpine lake. Apparently their idea of migration is really a group effort. The entire species congregates at one place at a time. Not a good strategy. I never knew that I was witnessing the entire population of a species on the brink of extinction. Only now, some 30 years later, are they making a comeback.

GUTTERED CANDLE

In my grandmother’s knotted hands, 

she held the sorrow and joy of a lifetime,

she held hope for the future locked

in the eyes of her grandchildren.

Those hands that tilled the soil, 

that harvested the fruit, shucked corn, 

skinned deer, plucked quail. I remember

the way she chopped wood, the heft of the axe,

how she banked the fire, the way she kept us safe.

She brought back the past, made it come alive—

all those old stories of the Ireland she left as a girl,

A time when people were closer to the land. 

She held the stories of the Otherworld, a record 

of when the old gods walked freely among us,

bringing dreams and mischief to the land.

Her mother lit the candle, as did her mother before her,

placing it in the window so that the ancestors 

could find their way home in the dark.

12/8

PICKING HUCKLEBERRIES

Come Labor Day, a trek to the coast, 

to our secret spot on the ridge where huckleberries 

waited for end-of-summer sunlight to sweeten and swell. 

When the coastal fog bank lifted,

the last rays of summer warmed the earth, 

the berries gave a last shout-out before the fall 

began its bone-chilling dance toward winter.

It was always a gamble to predict the ripening.

First to ripen were the smaller black ones, 

like beady eyes, laden with a pungent flavor, 

then the larger sweet blues, covered glaucous dreams. 

We’d pick those berries, plinking them into plastic milk jugs 

until the sun slipped over the edge of the the ocean. 

Cattle headed towards the barn as the last rays 

cast a mantle of vermilion light over the hills.

The song of distant coyotes, cattle called out to stragglers.

The edges of mist rose up from stock ponds

that glowed indigo and sparkled with stranded stars 

as if to witness earlier gatherings.

We hoarded our bounty, rolling berries on old towels, 

one by one, to remove the duff and leaf litter, 

until the white towels were stained purple as midnight.

We’d dream of huckleberry pies, and syrup over ice cream.

Our mouths, black maws, stained tongue and teeth, a badge.

There was no short cut, the cleaning always took longer 

than the picking, but more often than not,

our cache would soften and rot in Ziploc bags,

or turn to vinegar to dress the end of summer salads,

those vine-ripened tomatoes and basil,

hinting at the dank mossy breath of forest floor

covered with death, and the promise of ancient gatherings.

12/7/22 Write On! Susie Terence

In search of the Gorbals

The Gorbals was the ultimate slum of Glasgow, primarily settled by the famine Irish, Poles, and Russian Jews who worked in the shipyards, ironworks, weaving, and manufacturing factories during the Industrial Revolution. 

Probably the roughest neighborhood in all of Scotland, portions of the Gorbals were razed for the notorious substandard council flats, concrete towers during the 1960s, featured in a 2011 BBC exposé, were laden with serious structural defects, and rampant mold, etc., then replaced by the tony/ugly urban box renewal housing in the late 1990s-early 2000s, thus displacing literally everyone (90,000+) who lived there. 

I remember the plane circling Glasgow, 1972, the edifices grim, and streaked with coal dust. I never wanted that plane to land. That mean city. All that urban renewal merely traded one atrocity for another. Most of the blocks were leveled between 2000 to 2016. Then came the displacement. Now, the Gorbals houses about 9000 of the upwardly mobile in brutalist structures, but what happened to that writhing sea of humanity displaced by urban renewal? Where did they go, to East Kilbride?

I got to see a small section of what was left of the Gorbals in 2008. The Gorbals was famous for its ongoing flea markets. But, by then, most of the area was rubble rubble rubble everywhere. It looked like a bomb had been dropped. The novel, No Mean City (1935) is set in the Gorbals.

My friend’s father, Joe Hardstone, a talented musician, was born and raised in the Gorbals, it took a special ear to be able to understand what he said. He also spoke Russian and Yiddish with a Gorbals accent. I could understand him just fine because I was raised by my grandmother from southern Cork, Ireland. Joe/Isaac became one of the fastest sprinters in the Gorbals, outrunning the street gangs that lurked on every corner, with his violin under arm. 

Most of the famous Gorbalites were boxers and futba’ players on account of all that running. Perhaps the Gorbals most famous exports were the landed Irish who were murderers and gangsters. Jimmy Boyle, who murdered a gang member, switched careers and became a famous novelist and playwright while in prison. UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy grew up in the Gorbals. As did Sir Thomas Lipton, the teabag man, Allan Pinkerton, as in the detective agency, and Mickey Rooney’s Da. All Irish, I might add.

Mending the kilt

SALTIRE SKY (3 haiku)

Yesterday’s sky stretched

over taut coastal ridges 

was a vast saltire. 

Against a saltire sky, 

dusk flagged the coastal hills

with a catch of the day.

Mackerel skies 

crisscrossed with saltire jet streams

and billowing hills.

11/30

SPRECHGESANG

In my dead mother‘s purse, amid matchbooks,

roaches and cigarette butts, needles and pills,

a broken audiotape of Leonard Cohen‘s 10 New Songs. 

What she was listening to, what transported her

when the drugs no longer numbed the pain.

I fixed the tape and slipped it into the tapedeck.

His voice, a gift, having betrayed him early on

from far too many cigarettes, his song having gone 

gravelly in his prime, and yet here he was, 

talk-singing his way through a new body of work 

as he massaged his voice back into the game, 

taking me along for the ride to the end of love. 

I sent that tape off with my mother, lying so still, 

to be warmed by the bonfire, and the resurrection 

of Leonard sprechgesanging his way through 

the chorus of Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah 

all the way to the end of time.

1/30 Terri Glass Write On!

A NOTE TO CÚ CHULAINN

Oh, Hound of Cullen, 

I always wanted to ask you,

who did your hair? I mean 

with all those electrified locks 

standing upright like needles in rainbow hues,

capable of striking your enemies dead,

would be tricky to lime into dreadlocks.

And your superhuman strength—beyond imagining, 

with your seven fingers on each hand,

and seven toes on each foot, 

did they need special shoes, pampooties,

and which little piggies went to market? 

And what about those seven-pupiled eyes 

that could see beyond the curtain of time, 

unshielded by the glamor of Ray Bans,

did they help you to win your battles? 

What was the fabric of your dreams made of?

You, who were born of Lugh, the god of sun & light.

Sétanta, may I call you by your given name,

instead of your battlefield handle, Cú Chulainn, 

O Hound of War, for you turned your body inside out 

to scare the enemy, and your trusty grey horse & chariot 

were always at the ready, ready to die for you.

And you with your gáe bolga, a superpower weapon

unleashed against the backdrop of the Bronze Age, 

reimagined by monks during the Middle Ages, 

would wait another millennium before it was made real, 

a grenade for the ages. I am come. Destroyer of worlds.

But you broke your geis, because you could not refuse 

the hospitality of the hag, offering you the taboo 

of roasted dog, eating your namesake, 

or refuse hospitality, the cursed twofold dilemma, 

O Hound of Cullen, how you must’ve howled in rage 

by that base trickery, the lón láith, the long light 

shining from your brow, and you came undone, 

your superpowers bleeding back into the earth.

And to think of how you exploded onto the scene, 

upholding the honor of the world as you knew it, 

a world in turmoil, and how you died upright, lashed 

to a standing stone so you would not fall in battle,

the Mórrighan and her scaldcrows on the battlefield,

waiting to pluck out those marvelous eyes,

while we hid beneath our school desks, 

with our arms shielding our eyes, protecting 

our slender necks from the unholy light,

waiting for the bomb to drop. No magic cloak 

of forgetfulness to hide our fear.

11/23/22 Write On! Terri Glass

The doe’s breakfast

One of our young deer, Bucky’s sister, is badly injured. At first I thought perhaps she’d gotten tangled up in a barbed wire fence, as we’ve been working on the fence line. Or maybe she had been attacked by a mountain lion or a coyote—we chased off one opportunistic coyote yearling who came snuffling down the trail from the tank after her. There is transfer blood on the doe’s good hind leg, and she can’t put any weight on her right hind leg. The wound almost looks like her leg is broken, her hock is badly swollen. Because she can’t put weight on her hindquarters, she also can’t feed herself by rearing up on her hind legs for the meager winter fare of low hanging leaves of the fruit trees in the garden. We watch her limp across the field, debating what to do, no longer knowing anyone with a gun to put her out of her misery. We debated whether to call Fish and Game, or the Humane Society, a certain death sentence, but we aren’t willing to watch her die of sepsis, or let nature, long in tooth and claw, take its course. I come from that old rural school where you do not let injured animals suffer. You see, when I was young, I wanted to be a vet. I learned rudimentary feline and equine triage from Point Reyes’ Doc. Daniels, DMV. We wondered how the deer got injured. Then we realized the model was at hand, as a handyman jackknifed his truck up our narrow road as if he were a contender for the Indie 500. Perhaps he, a neighbor, or a visiting friend, hit that poor deer and then kept on going, never stopping to report the hit. Criminal, to leave her to suffer like that. We keep an eye on her, noting her minute progress each day, as she limps down to the creek for her daily drink. There is still not very much for the deer to eat after the prolonged drought cycle. And it is still too soon for nourishing winter grasses. They have taken to nibbling the jackets off the buckeyes and eating ivy leaves, both of which are toxic. So they can only eat a small amount without damage to their livers. I suspect she has already eaten her quota. Today is a black frost day. The pipes were almost frozen solid, I had trouble gathering enough water for morning tea. The frost has been thick every morning, leaving the tent painted in a mirage of crystals. I have been feeding the doe for days since it seems she may survive this trauma after all. Her hock is surely blown, but I think it is not broken. I know they can survive these onslaughts. (Another gimpy doe, hit by a tourist in Nicasio a few years ago, lives out a full life by my cousin’s old water tower. Each year she presents him with spotted twins.) At dawn I prepare a breakfast of Bob’s Red Mill organic oats garnished with yellow apple leaves, red plum leaves, rose petals and leaves, which at first, she viewed with suspicion, and then she discovered they were actually quite good. She still eyes the pumpkin with horror (Bucky and gang won’t touch them, so much for all those Facebook memes) but I have noticed that she has eaten some of the strands and the seeds. Progress. Sometimes I talk to her and she cocks her ears toward me as she listens to my murmuring. Sometimes Bucky stands on the other side of the garden fence keeping vigil as she eats her breakfast. This is our morning ritual.

Aurora borealis in blue

Once, during the 1970s, I was in West Marin, in Northern California, a stray wisp of aurora borealis was visible, a rare event this far south, and I watched the errant solar lightshow pulse and turn, shining in extraordinary shades of blues, greens and turquoise like a massive peacock feather against the  eastern quadrant of an indigo summer sky. In the gloaming, I imagined the backdrop of our planetary gods, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars to be astonished by the lightshow. People insisted that I was merely seeing the tail end of a non-existent rocket launch (I’ve seen a few of those too), but it wasn’t that. No manmade events to blame. Unlike a rocket launch, the celestial cloud didn’t dissipate, it lingered and hovered and pulsed for quite some time. It was an interlude of pure celestial magic that I never forgot. And now this video! I feel vindicated.

THE WHEEL

Don’t fall in love with a stray cat or horse, 

for once you name it, it’s all yours, 

until death do you part. Whose, I don’t know.

Don’t fall too easily in love with the seasons 

because they evolve into the next season 

and soon the years will stack up like dominoes 

and at the end of your life, the domino effect 

will take on a whole new level of meaning. 

Don’t fall in love with regret, or the future, 

because the future is always madly dancing 

on the edge of the sand dune, taunting you 

with the corpses of old promises and regrets. 

You know, those things you always meant to do, 

Those lovers whom you always meant to meet,

those places where you always meant to go, 

but you never had the urge or the inclination, 

and now that you have the time, 

if you can catch it that is, for it too 

is dancing madly on the edge of night, 

always hovering out of sight. 

Only in dreams can you grasp it, 

make sense of it, call it yours. That is, 

until you wake up and it fades 

into oblivion like some distant mirage 

taunting you on the horizon of regret.

11/16/22 Write On! Terri Glass

NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS

A busy moth led me to a night-blooming cereus 

lit by moonlight behind a low lava wall.

My cousin said the fragrant pānini-o-ka-punahou

blooms but once a year, and dies at dawn.

I leaned in to taste the intoxicating odor,

but it let go of its mooring and fell to the ground,

a fallen star or perhaps an angel. So I saved it,

and wore it in my hair the next morning, 

to witness the full eclipse of the sun, 
at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, the place of refuge.

We watched the black sun become a vast flower 

surrounded by stars and solar winds as the birds 

and fishes slept in during that second false dawn.

Seeking asylum, I let the blossom go in the coral sea 

to dream among the honu turtles and seastars.

11/11/22

HOMECOMING

No one wants to witness a broken world, 

they want to recuse themselves. Call it an act 

of God, blame climate change, the list is long.  

The “not me “generation is an army 

of Jedi masters adept at deflecting blame. 

Not me, they say, not my problem,

as if their lives were as pure as the first snow. 

Imagine that dead tree hovering over the roofline, 

saying not me, as a limb sloughed off during the storm. 

Or the outcrop, loosened by rain, galloping into traffic, 

saying not me, not my fault. The cliff did it, it let go. 

It let go of my hand in the dark. 

Or the rising river after the storm, 

nibbling away at the ancient shoreline 

as the old house threw off its moorings 

to set sail for the open mouth of the sea. 

The sea whispered, not me, not me,

as a sneaker wave swept over the fishing boat 

too far from safe harbor to be saved. 

What treasures the sea holds, what stories it has to tell, 

where everything winds up at the bottom. 

RED SKY AT NIGHT

Mount Barnabe lookout tower

built like the cabin of a small trawler 

schooling for fish among the clouds.

11/4/22?

Morning aubade (photos)

The coyotes are howling at both ends of the valley—in broad daylight. Harvest moon has come and gone. Earlier it was a family of small owlets who still can’t properly hoot. Soon, Bucky and his old father with the hoarfrost dipped nose, will daintily dink their way down from the hill to get their morning drink from the creek. They have no fear, now that hunting season is over. Last night was supposed to be first frost, but again, the grass has no dew on it, so we can’t see the lacework of the orb spiders laying out their crocheted webs on the dry grass. Even the dew is forsaking us.

I love lying in my flannel sleeping bag listening to the morning chorus of birds. Mostly ravens patrolling the valley muttering grock-grock, and the small screech owls in the trees are having trouble getting the correct sequence of their hoot on, so I can’t tell what species they are, not great horned owls, nor burrowing owls. One-note towhees and chupping robins add to the morning’s cacophony. The robins and warblers are getting hammered on the clusters of madrone berries. Soon the quail will add their smik-smik sounds in the underbrush. The bluejay adds his metallic squitch-squitch scissor sharpening sounds to the score. 

The redtail hawks no longer circle this valley, nor call it home, but an opportunistic red-shouldered hawk moved in and has raised a family, she is constantly squawking like a fishwife, at war with the ravens and crows who are now barking like dogs. No love lost between them. I prefer the redtails with their lonely tcheer sound. My totem animal. I heard one redtail passing overhead, why do they no longer stay here? 

Who said nature was peaceful? It’s one massive turf war out there raging tooth and claw. A hummingbird lectures a poison oak bush with its mip-clicks. The gray squirrels are busy scolding each other in the bay trees down by the creek. I love waking up in the tent, knowing I don’t have much longer where I can sleep outside like this. Poignant reminder of passing time. Yesterday, I had to secure the tent, really a rickety summer gazebo, from the fierce winds bellowing in from the east. It rocked like a taut jib sail, the tie down ropes singing like harp strings. 

Yesterday I finished stacking the rest of the cordwood for winter. Like a draft horse I pulled 20 small wagonloads of wood up the hill. Mostly dense cypress and fruitwood. Day three of my second COVID booster, I’m puffing, but I feel surprisingly good. First sun illumines the buckeyes, small golden orbs. The deer are hungry, eating the jackets off the toxic buckeye. 

So much love and hard labor is required to clear out my grandmother’s old garden orchard after a half-century of neglect. Last week we took 16 loads of debris down to the road to the county chipper, we are fire hardening the land. We will haul 20 more loads down to the road, and repeat again the following week. Two little old ladies with broad backs and battery-operated chainsaws who refuse to succumb to the vagaries of age. My hips hurt from hauling wood, but this winter, my cousins will stay warm. 

The tongue of low lying morning fog is infrequent these days and because of it, the trees—especially the redwoods and firs—are aging out, dying from pine beetle infestation and a profound lack of water. A tinderbox of a pocket canyon waiting for the hunger of a match. The last time this valley burned was in 1942. The first thing that drew me to poetry was the the wind in the fir trees sounding like ocean waves. And the bluejays making similes. I didn’t realized how much I missed keeping rhythm with the seasons, especially the long dance of the fall. Saying goodbye to my childhood. Maybe for the last time.

HUNTER’S MOON

The warbler arrived during the very first days of fall,

yellow as the big leaf maple deep in the canyon.

Mornings I’m awakened by his body, a small sun

banging against the pane. He peers into my garret, 

determined to enter the dark dream of the house, 

but my grandmother said, Death always knocks. 

To let a bird in was to let death enter the house.

At first, I thought his reflection spurred him on, 

but on overcast mornings, he’s still at the ready. 

Sometimes he rests on the window screen, 

his tiny claws gaining purchase on the mesh. 

People offer sage advice, say, add pictures of raptors.

Close the blinds. It’s his karma, he’s not hurting himself, 

not like that nuthatch who attacked the outdoor mirror

with such ferocity, I gave him time out, between bouts,

he rested in the hollow of my hand, until the next foray.

Tiny warrior, he fluttered onto the daybed, spent,

his rage against the interloper knew no respite. 

I covered the mirror with a towel to ease our pain. 

But this time I’m not willing to cut off the light. 

Besides, this bird takes time out as he reconnoiters.

I wanted to write about something completely different,

not death, nor the monograph of a warbler seeking solace. 

I forgot the nuances of fall, the dim light, long nights, 

the waning hunter’s moon like a gourd 

glowing in the branches of the redwood. 

Hello Moon, I said, and the moon winked back.

10/12 Write On! With Susie Terence

Gallery 6 reading poster

From City Lights Bookstore: 

On this day, 67 years ago, the Six Gallery reading took place on 3119 Fillmore St.
Philip Lamantia (reading the work of John Hoffman)
Michael McClure
Allen Ginsberg
Gary Snyder
Philip Whalen
Kenneth Rexroth was the MC

A momentous event in Western literature, 1955, this reading at Gallery 6 heralded in the birth of the Beat poets. Kenneth Rexroth would’ve been the most renown poet of his time, part of the San Francisco literary renaissance. The others were relatively new to poetry. The idea of Beat poets had not yet been coined.

My old boyfriend, John Oliver Simon, was one of the Six Gallery poets featured at a later reading. He had a framed poster on his living room wall. He considered it his most significant reading. I never thought to take a photo of it.

I knew everyone on this list, except for Lamantia. I only knew McClure in passing; Ginsberg and Rexroth were aloof. Snyder and Whalen were always kind, especially Philip. 

Also in attendance were Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Howl after hearing it at the reading. And Neal Cassady was the doorman. One can assume that Jack Spicer was also there. And Robin Blazer. One could also speculate Robert Duncan was there too…. It was a small world. Gallery co-founder, Wally Hedrick lived in the San Geronimo Valley, where I grew up….

I have old negatives (I need to scan) of most of them….way back from when I was newly arrived to poetry. I was always documenting readings as no one else was…. We produced a new reading with Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure at Sonoma State, it was a stellar event. Ginsberg came to a friend’s memorial service in Santa Rosa which blew all our minds.

Rexroth, who wrote a weekly column, was a hiking buddy of my grandfather’s, at Devil’s Gulch. And his wife used to attend our church in Lagunitas. She kept the name long after Kenneth had divorced her.

Poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote some 700 columns (1960-67) for SF Examiner, he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical, and  even (somewhat misleadingly) as "the godfather of the Beat Generation." See my post on Rexroth columns, a synopsis of the reading from Verdant Press, and McClure’s reminiscences at UC Press post.

ORION’S BELT

Nights are drawing in, 

dusk announces the timeless march 

of the stars. I can see Orion’s Belt 

emerging through the trees. 

Then, his shoulders and club. 

Then the Pleiades, gazelle leaps.

The hunter and the hunted gird their loins.

The winter pear tree glows, 

rivaling the rubescent poison oak.

A woodpecker probes the depths of the pine. 

A staccato rhythm. Time to stack firewood. 

The incessant drone and purr of chainsaws, 

a distant symphony echoes in smoky canyons, 

a blue haze tangles in the limbs of tall trees. 

The owlets practice their newly minted song, 

it’s a bit hit and miss, so they say whooo-hoo

with reckless abandon along with the coyotes.

But the crickets haven’t gotten the memo 

that summer’s really over. 

So, they carry on, as crickets do

in joyous tintinnabulation and encore.

Harvest moon clears the ridge, 

filled with light from the well of the past. 

Frogs join in the lively august chorus. 

Bottled light spills across the path. 

The young buck sharpens his new horns 

on the downed cypress limbs. 

He devours the plum and ivy clippings. 

The acrid odor of early fires, 

a pungent memory announces

the arrival of the dark season.

10/6 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick k

I wrote this is a prose peace and everyone said it was a poem so I put it into lines to see what it looks like. I am still undecided what to do with it. I should’ve kept the prose version as well. Whenever a prose poem is converted into a poem, many lines need to change. We’re not there yet. Still debating what to do.

DISTANT SHORES

     —after Anne Sexton’s Her Kind

We learned early to dress like the others, 

in order to blend in. But it was a small boat 

and there wasn’t enough room for everyone

if you didn’t fit in, it was a case of sink or swim. 

When the nuns arrived announcing religion, 

their wimples were sails aimed toward distant shores.

Our arms became tall masts, we were identified.

We caught the wind. It was a case of where to begin. 

I was the daydreamer, the chameleon, 

and the easel, my siren call. I painted red skies

because the white page was a hungry void

waiting to be filled, when I couldn’t blend in.

I inhabited a world of my own making, 

to escape the confines of the classroom. 

When the teacher took away my brushes, 

I used my hands, then my blood, I didn’t fit in.

Tall clouds set sail for distant shores.

Even the wind couldn’t hold them in.

10/5 Write On! With Susie Terence

THE PURE LIFE

The first dream began in the mountains, 

and curled up like fog in deep canyons.

All that beauty with no way out, but up. 

But still, you couldn’t see a way out.

And so, you scrambled over rough scree 

seeking a trail but it disappeared into the void

until you were confronted by a sheer rock wall 

where the choice was to either turn around, 

or to seek a new route down, so you began

to study the rock face for hidden clues, 

searching for secret toeholds and handfasts 

to lift that Sisyphean weight toward the sky.

But there were so many false trails and dead ends 

that could all lead you into that moment of freefall.

Yet you might be tempted to spread your wings 

and soar like a bird testing the fetters of the air.

To think of how the stories of distant horizons beckon.

But landing is inevitable, and it will always be rough.

9/28 Write On with Terri Glass

THE RAPTURE OF THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

While I watched the birds flit in the skewed rafters of Scheve Jan,

Oude Kerk, my friend pointed to a worn inscription on the stone floor.

I got down on my hands and knees in order to read it,

and shrieked, as I was sprawled atop a Petri dish, the graveslab 

of the father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 

a draper who perfected the loupe and the aquatic microscope.

He, who discovered kleine diertjes, cavorting wee beasties, 

animalcules frolicking in the rainwater and in the canals of Delft—

delven means to dig, and so he delved a canal into the obscure arts.

He was the first to witness unnamed creatures of an unknown world—

paramecia, protozoa & spermatozoa—I don’t even want to go there.

In winter light, the church was too dark for my camera to record,

I needed spectacles to see. But at that moment my feet 

(& knees) gave me a more pious vision. I was so enthralled,

I overlooked the plaque of that other master of ultramarine shadow 

and light, I came too late to see—Vermeer, and his camera lucida, 

but at a vlooienmarkt in front of City Hall, I found antique Delft tiles 

painted with dragonflies, and a beatific saint rising above the marsh.

9/27

Observationes microscopicae drawn by Antoni Leeuwenhoek, 1682 Wiki

Poems & photos published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, Four Feathers Press

Five poems and two photos published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, PDF/hard copy, Four Feathers Press monthly publication plus chapbook series, Don Kingfisher Campbell, Editor, 2022. 13th WAVE, Storm, Buenaventura (photo), TECOPA HOT SPRINGS (photo), NATURAL SELECTION, SIMMER RITUAL. 

Yeep, I thought I was submitting poems to another edition of Spectrum. I didn’t get past the premise of the title—I like themed entries—as the deadline was hours away. My bad. Imagine my surprise to learn it’s Four Feather Press, not Spectrum, which has moved to an online format. Not sure how to handle the format as it straddles publishing realms, not quite a vanity press, only existing as a PDF, or print on demand, and the poems are not available on Don’s website so very few people will ever actually see the poems—other than those of us who have had poems accepted. Oh well. 

I expected Don to take one poem, not all five, and one wasn’t even a poem! I’ve known Don for decades—most of my life through California Poets in the Schools—and I do like supporting his publishing endeavors with my work and I find it a good choice to find published homes for my older poems. 

Perfect bound printed copies of the book will be available for $15 a copy (includes shipping) until November 14th, 2022. Please use Meta Pay (Don Kingfisher Campbell), Venmo (@don-campbell-82), or Zelle (my email address). Or snail mail a check to Don Campbell, 1313 Edgewood Dr, Alhambra, CA 91803-1909.

THE BRONZE HORSE

The big bronze horse statue stood on three legs 

behind the fireplace for decades, abandoned. 

The detachable western saddle on its back 

was blanketed with spider webs and the dust of neglect. 

Once part of a train boiler, our makeshift fireplace,

sat on a discarded iron wheel base with no place left to go—

It was so cavernous, you could roast an ox in its maw.

Still, it kept us warm, as my grandmother fed its hunger 

with massive oak logs that slumbered on rebar firedogs

throughout the long stretch of cold winter nights.

The red eyes of coals winked out as she smoored the fire.

The horse lived in a realm of brick hearth and cast-iron walls. 

No pastures, blue skies, or clouds carrying a promise of rain.

How many years that discarded horse must’ve dreamed 

of escaping the dark confines of that inglenook.

It was a curio my uncles picked up from the military PBX, 

during the war years, along with the print of the lone cypress.

This was during a time when Remington scenes were all the rage, 

decked out on the best coffee tables and mantelpieces 

along with gaudy ashtrays and chrome cocktail shakers.

But this was no Remington horse and cowboy 

depicting the nostalgia of the Wild West. 

It was a slant dream of Americana, a peace offering 

made by a captive army of alien workers

stationed on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

The bronze thoroughbred balanced on three legs, 

the fourth leg lost, his race was run, but in my mind’s eye

he was was wild as the mustangs on the prairie

if you removed the saddle and the ball chain reins.

Not something to be put down—not like in real life. 

My grandmother tried to glue the leg with epoxy, 

then she made a splint of asbestos tape. Nothing worked. 

It was not a dream that could be mended, 

for it was made of base pot-metal, not enduring bronze.

Stamped on his belly, Made in Occupied Japan. A facsimile—

like mirrored reflections imploding inward upon each other.

A wounded child, I was crazy about all things horses, 

so in that peremptory possessiveness of children,

any found horse was always mine. Mine!

This was during the cusp of days before

those plastic Breyer horses became so popular. 

I collected a stableful of them, replete with broken legs, 

as I tried to ride them into the box canyons of imagination.

I was a child always looking for an escape route.

Sometimes, when the wind blew down the chimney, 

it howled like a train carving an arc on distant horizons.

9/21 Terri Glass Write On!

Minty fresh mouse traps

After the oil change folks cleaned out my car’s air filter, where apparently the country mice were partying heartily, I drenched it in peppermint oil to drive them off—who knew those hitchhiker mice don’t like mint?  So instead of vacating the premises, they merely moved abodes. I had a sleekit timorous mousy living in my emergency brake sheath. I dumped peppermint oil down the shaft too and my car smelled like a strong breath mint with vague undertones of mice urine. My car reeked with the toxic odor of mint oil, so strong that it made my eyes water, and I couldn’t use the air conditioner or the heater, let alone, drive the car without leaving all the windows open. God knows what it was doing to my lungs. The mouse ate through my food stashes, chewing through Ziploc baggies and canisters, and then it moved onto my art supplies which made for colorful poop scattered at both ends of my car. Then it began to shred the car insulation and paper to make a nest. I removed several nests, but she was persistent. The last thing I needed was a mouse raising her family in my emergency brake sheath. It came down to this, it was either the mouse, or me. I was tired of being a mouse chauffeur, not to mention, unpaid landlord. Besides, I could not tolerate the grassy odor of a pissy rodent living in the close confines of my car. Especially during the heat wave. I feared that the wiring would be next. I tried all manner of snap-traps and glue traps. She didn’t like peanut butter, and deftly removed the nuts and grains that I left as bait. Nothing worked until the exterminator gave me huge extra-strength glue traps meant for rats. It was a case of location location location. I tried several spots in the car, nothing worked. Eventually I found the sweet spot under the passenger seat next to the emergency wine bottles. I admired the sleek beauty of such a tiny being capable of wreaking such havoc in my car. And then I did the coup de grace endgame with my shoe.

Petaluma Poetry Walk reading book party at Aqus café

I was a bit surprised to open the first part of the reading. Earlier we had a memorial reading for Geri diGiorno, founder of the Petaluma Poetry Walk. I read a rough poem about a car accident in a man being killed. Geri’s daughter Michelle dressed me in a scarf and a hat afterwards told me to take books— many were signed.

• THE GIFT OF THIS DAY

At Geri diGiorno’s memorial reading

At the memorial reading, Geri’s daughter hands me a poem, and I read it aloud to the audience, cold turkey. I had no idea what to expect. Or where the poem was going. I had not pre-read it to myself. It reminded me of the time Molly Fisk asked me to read a poem of hers, at a Green Fuse reading in Sebastopol, and as I read her poem, there was that indelible moment when you can’t go back, and you’re committed to finish the poem, no matter how hard the subject matter is. The transgressions of her father. There is no going back. Like with Geri’s poem about a man in a red and black car, airborne and all that red and black everywhere. And Geri’s daughter, Michelle dressing me in one of Geri’s red felt, hats and a red and black scarf. I inhabit the moment of her personae. Her poem, her death.

During the summer of fire

During the summer of fire I slept beneath the madrone at my grandmother’s house, herself long gone, but the evening breeze carried the sorrow of smoke, and the sky was bathed an amber light. The moon, a raging red eye seeking water. The coyotes didn’t know whether to howl or to bark. And the young horned owls, still working on their slow solos, had trouble counting the notes. The stars, a distant memory. Their light occluded by the veil of smoke, the death knell of dying trees.

Mt. Tam watercolor for Laura Austin Wiley, 4 x 6”

I ran my original watercolor thru a cartoon app

Masks

The face behind the face, the mask that becomes analogous with time present, the idea that we are always impersonating ourselves, even when we think we have removed the mask. Another one hides behind it. And so on. Impersonators impersonating impersonators. Why all the tears? When will it ever end? My reflection is clouded silver where the mercurial silver peeled off the back of the old beveled mirror like madrone bark. It’s like looking into all those banks of mirrors at the Exploratorium, mirrors looking into themselves ad infinitum, that greeny distance of rain, a portal into another world where any dimension is possible, even time. Once again, our lives have become too structured—even at the tail end of this pandemic, we are busy filling our dance cards. Did we not learn anything under sequestration? Sometimes it’s nice to shut the merry-go-round off, let the ponies run free and become someone else’s nightmare. Hooves on the pavement at midnight, my nemesis, the ponies on walkabout again, me running down the road in my nightgown and the ponies wily as coyotes, always just out of reach. The cat wants in on the conversation but she can only sing a one-note aria. Breezes coming in from the west. Storm brewing at last.

8/15 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

BRÓN TROGAIN

Fall began its descent abruptly this year, 

breaking summer’s anvil almost without warning, 

verdant trees turned yellow overnight, 

having gotten their final curtain call too soon. 

The forest understory is painted with amber light 

of hazel leaves, big leaf maple, and box elder, 

and the oaks are dressed in fiery gowns of poison oak. 

So far, we’ve been spared the ravages of wildfires 

still raging in the Cascades and in the Sierras. 

I can no longer remember the names of wildfires, 

now too many to count. Soon there will be no trees 

left to breathe in this dire Anthropocene epoch.

Distant smoke tints the harvest moon the color 

of returning salmon, but the creeks are dry.

A surprise earthquake keeps us on our toes. 

The earth is moaning and shaking, as if in dismay.

We move into the season with abruptness, no warning. 

The Irish called end of summer Brón trogain, earth’s sorrow. 

A time of ravens on the horizon. May the rains come early. 

For I am tired of weeping, and my tears no longer fall.

9/14 Terri Glass, Write on!

At the Pine Aire Resort

At the Pine Aire Resort, small red cabins with covered porches in white trim, greeted us. They lined the Feather River, where the rocks rose up like piles of old workboots, where slumbering gold wedged in the streambed, wended its way downstream into mad dreams. I remember how my aunts gathered in the tribes, the sisters, our grandmother, and myriad cousins straddling the generations, we caravanned up to the Feather River traversing the brutal heat of the Central Valley, in old vans reeking of oil, to visit Norm’s place, the sweet pine odor of Las Plumas del Oro, and seething crickets, greeted us. Each of us claimed a small bit of turf on the covered porches, our home away from home for a week. We were within listening range of the river and the myriad frogs. My family took vacations at my Grandma’s house in West Marin. Late at night, the train with its angry red eye, whistled its way through the slate-walled moonlit canyon, the rails hummed a precursor song like a lonesome harmonica. Norm was the size of a VW bug, with a heart of gold. Gold was his abiding passion, he showed us his prized gnarled nuggets nestled in cotton boxes. He couldn’t bring himself to cash them in. He took us to his claim downriver, and after we sluiced for gold all day long, we shared small specks of the sun that winked and gleaned with promise. Then my grandmother, and the aunts began to die off, one by one, my mother included. This was the place where she told me the cancer had come back. I never saw her again. Years later, my cousin and I made a return trip to the Feather River, Norm was long gone, but the two housemaids who always took care of us, greeted us like old friends. They inherited the cabins, and Norm’s Pine Aire tradition carried on.

9/7 Susie Terence, Write On!

• THE SONG OF PASSING TRAINS

At the highland games

 I carry my house with me, my entire car is a go bag. Right now, I’m packed to the gills, ready for the next storm. Ready for my workshop at the Highland games. Encampment, where we create an ambience somewhere between fantasy and the middle ages. All of us re-creating a time that never was. We will greet the public and we will take on the persona of our characters, convincing the public that we are magicians. I will create a living history art room in the barn. I will hang my silk art up and it will flutter in the wind and look like a gypsy camp. After Covid, the games were canceled, sequestration. So now I feel so rusty and out of sorts but the show must go on.

9/1 Mill Valley nonfiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

WEATHERING THE DROUGHT

Let the fog roll in over the ridge

on little cat feet and let it be a cliché,

but also let it curl around the trees 

to remind them that the half-life 

of a drought is not forever. 

Let the redwoods remember this, 

and let them dig deeper, and remember 

to hold on, because the soil‘s parched throat 

speaks of the ceaseless journey of rivers. 

Trees I have known a lifetime, 

turning brown with sorrow, let them not weep.

Let the rivers not forget their serpentine story, 

whispering old secrets amid the rocks, 

and the sand bars on that journey to the ocean. 

Let the ocean assuage the shore like a cat 

kneading her paws on your lap. 

Let my tears join the saltiness of the ocean.

Let the cat curl up on the doorstep, 

and wait on the windowsill to greet the sun. 

Let the sun rise above the billowing fog 

and let the trees sing, let them sing

of the coming rain.

8/31 Terri Glass Write On!

Wildfire, revisited

What moment, she asks, drawing a blank. The page beckons like a memory emerging from the fog, dripping from the air. So many moments in a lifetime to choose from. I am like Alice falling down the well. A fire combusting in my mind.

I came home from the islands, jetlagged, sunburned and disoriented. Driving into town was challenging. On the ridge I saw a small puff of smoke, almost like a sprite, it announced itself. So I pulled over to watch it, and within seconds it became a mushroom cloud. 

The air is crisp and bright, a fall day. The vineyards are ablaze with color, yellow, red, and burgundy. Oat grasslands on the hillside stretch like tawny beasts to the horizon. And the canyons, dark with oak and chaparral. The column rises up like a cobra to the sky, dancing above the ridge-line where it hits an inversion layer and becomes a shining city. Billowing on the ground, rolling sideways as the fire gains traction. Everything is unseasonably dry at the end of October. Drought cycle.

I pull my camera out to document the plume, it’s ravenening its way across the canyon, it will consume so much land. Some guy in a big truck yells at me because I’m blocking the driveway to the doggie daycare. I point to the horizon and say look, speechless. He ignores me and continues to yell. Little does he know it’s going to be one of the worst fires in Northern California. Later we will call it the Kincade fire. So I start my car and drive towards Santa Rosa. 

Geyser Peak is dressed in smoke so thick it looks like a volcanic eruption. I turn around and head back home to pack when the evacuation warning comes. Not mandatory, thank God. It’s all a waiting game. See what happens. But the folks on Pine Flat Road won’t be as lucky. 

The fire would not be assuaged, the fire fighter planes dump load after load of water and retardant on the hillsides, flocking everything in hot pink dresses hiked up over the thigh. I watch the Spirit of John Muir circle overhead, a supertanker so big, it has to fly back to Sacramento just to refuel. I have a prime ringside side seat to devastation. I sit mesmerized and I am overwhelmed. Not again is all I can say, not like the Tubbs fire, not again, but I know the drill.

ELEGY FOR JOHN OLIVER SIMON

And where did you go, my as my grandmother might have said. 

With your tousled hair and eyes made of fallen bits of the sky, 

the clouds knew you and wept for you when you left us.

The mountain summits knew you, and wept for you.

The desert remembered you and mourned for you.

Memory circles the rug by the fire like a cat or a dog 

settling in for a long winter nap, but finds little comfort there. 

The fire snarls, the logs pop like a gun, or the cracking of a whip, 

and smoke curls around my hair like a snake. 

It is late, and last night the tomcat was speaking of you 

as he patrolled the edges of the garden. 

He looked for you among the squashes and the rhubarb. 

He spoke of lost tuna dinners and wondered why 

you did not pull up the weeds, why you did not rise 

and go to your notebook with pen in hand. 

Rendering the next sonnet in your mind. 

Once you promised me the moon, and the sun rose 

in my belly, with that broken promise, we came undone. 

You promised me what was not possible 

and we spent our lives running from the truth. 

We ran to the opposite corners of the earth 

in search of something holy and profound 

to nourish that rage and hunger of art, each in our own way, 

the baggage of the past burdening us down.

We didn’t see the swift current, and its bright undertow 

bending the night to its will, where the water-ouzel 

hunted among the rocks for the coinage 

of small silvered fish glinting in the morning light. 

My grandmother said, to let a bird in, 

was to let death come into the house.

When I go down to to the well of sorrow, 

I find you among the cresses and the mosses. 

Sometimes I perch on the low stone wall 

to watch the first stars appear in the eye of the well. 

What is still alive between us, is memory, 

perhaps more mine, than yours, 

as we each hold different bags of grief 

made from the same skin of the heron.

And so I mourn for you, and the flight of birds

stitches the sky into a mosaic of loss. 

The birds gather strands of my hair, 

weaving time and sorrow into a web, 

a nest where the small speckled eggs of memory 

incubate into truth, and we remember what was good, 

all the betrayals of dailyness fell into dust 

until all that remains are the remnants—

those small scraps of love we once held so dear.

 

Shards of grief and loss litter the landscape of memory, 

piercing us to the core. But they have have moved the walls.

And we hung onto the next best thing, 

never allowing grief gather in its wings and to settle in, 

or to take root and to go to seed, we abbreviated 

the process into meaningless soundbytes, 

ready to move onto the next best thing.

 

You left before the pandemic, good move. 

Because if the cancer didn’t get you then covid would have. 

It felled us like flies after the first frost, 

five million dead, and still counting. Will it ever end?

It’s as if the black death came to pay a visit 

and the world came undone. 

The psyche that scarred us for centuries, continues on. 

Everyone is looking for explanations, reasons why, 

challenging the concept of Godhead. 

Who would do such a thing to us, and why?

And yet you still come to me in dreams.

You were my guiding star, my shining light, 

and what I learned, for you were also my teacher.

And for that I am grateful. 

8/27 Writing through grief workshop with Eileen Elizabeth Espinoza, Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event

Horse-divers for dinner

It seems I’m necking a bottle of wine for dinner, followed by an ice cream chaser and an adult gummy bear. Adulting is for the birds. To be fair, I had an avocado horse-diver. No, not avocado toast. Since the pandemic, my meals have become rather peculiar—partially because I am noshing from the food bank, you eats what you gets, and are given, but also because of a profound lack of motivation. I did have a dinner of sorts planned, but old rice, thawed, is related to sawdust. OK so I was desperate, the rice was marginally better than expected. I was off my feed after an unexpected wisdom tooth wrestling match with some elderly kale redolent of old sneakers with a piquant bouquet of canvas and athelete’s foot.

Silver spoon

I have an old silver spoon, it was once John’s silver spoon, before that, his ex-wife Jan’s silver spoon, she left it behind. A relic from the Victorian era when people had matching silverware and when cutlery was coinage routinely lifted by the unscrupulous scallywags to pay gambling debts. I don’t know why that spoon called out to me. I don’t remember how I wound up with it, but I think I must’ve lifted it when we split up. Something was owed to me.

I also wound up with Jan’s baby ring, both of us were Sagittarius, golden topaz birth stones. John, an Aries, couldn’t be bothered with such things. Reina the cat probably didn’t know the difference between silver and silver plate as long as her tunafish arrived on time, and it didn’t rain outside each door at the same time.

John’s house was an odd cobbled together affair, a cottage built before indoor plumbing, and it was dank and dreary. The windows shed little light into the house as some rooms were later built around it. The bathroom window led to a light well, once an outer wall, someone’s remodel plans gone awry. But there were marks of gentility, the hardwood floors laid out in the careful pattern around the floor furnace, also a later addition.

It is always late afternoon in the house of memory, with John waking from his afternoon nap, groggy and eager for coffee. The Italian espresso maker hissing like a snake on the burner on the Wedgewood stove.

Long light of fall, shadows take on that purple glow. And pumpkin-colored sunlight measured time on the hardwood floor. John said something about a translation he was working on. Maybe it was Otto Raúl‘s poem onto new colors I don’t remember, but I loved Otto Raul. 

We had just returned from a long summer in México meeting all the poets. My own poetry exponentially shifted as we explored the underbelly of Mexico. The new vistas, new diversions enriched my writing. But the urge to keep it authentic, keep it art versus the sensationalism of something new, was always the challenge. 

I’m standing in the living room, debating whether to stay or to go, the cat circles my ankles wanting to be fed. She is a consummate liar and it is never enough. Same with John. Is always never enough, as if he might miss an opportunity in a parallel universe to hook up with someone else. We were always circling the marsh of that self-created quagmire. He said, if I love you, am I trapped forever? I had no words for that, and we let it slip back into the void. 

The sky is stained with indigo and twilight. We were living in parallel worlds. You could see a sprinkling of stars emerging from the shadows of the earth, the penumbra like a sine-curve. I watched a late cloud catch fire and glow like the northern lights. There’s a name for it, noctilucent. Ethereal gossamer garments studded with evening stars. 

The silver spoon glows like a half moon and reflects the subtle scattered light. 

8/25 Telling your truth workshop with Carolyn Holbrook. Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event

Following the tip of my pen

I follow my pen to wherever it leads me. Today it carries me to the edge of the page where I jump into frigid waters like a penguin on a rapidly melting ice pack. Better than a cliff. Nothing is true ground or terra firma when you get down to it. If you are unsure and cannot give your writing a place to land, or perhaps a home, then what? My overriding goal is to make friends with grief, not letting it get in the way. But letting it stand on its own two feet. Or is it four feet? I acknowledge it, no need to take inventory of all those past transgressions, or to make a portmanteau of grief, for it will manifest itself in odd ways, and causes a chain reaction of sorrow. I am in love with the sound of my felt pen upon the page. Like a cat licking a pizza box, and I marvel at the fluidity and grace of my handwriting. It’s been years, decades since I’ve handwritten anything so the retro aspect is a welcome change in this electronic world we now inhabit.

8/25 Telling your truth workshop with Carolyn Holbrook. Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event

Perpetual Calendar

I remember the adults filling the house with their loud voices and the way they made the Irish crystal in the old Murphy bed turned into an armoire, ring and chime like a carillon-—it was as if the crystal needed to sing about the past. The crystal was from my other grandmother, the one whom I never met, the one who committed suicide, and left a note telling my father to become a priest, my inheritance. I know nothing about my grandmother Viola, for whom I am named, and next to nothing of my father either. So much was denied, so much was deliberately buried. Those goblets and finger bowls were from another era were mine, all mine. And they were only allowed to dance on the makeshift long table set for 23 relatives once a year, for Thanksgiving. I was especially enamored of the holidays as that was my birthday week and sometimes it even fell on Thanksgiving. The timing made me curious enough to turn to a perpetual calendar printed on the back of the telephone book. Now understand I am a disaster in math and I learned to read late so this was like finding buried treasure when I saw the pattern. See, I love science and already I was making hypotheses even if I couldn’t pronounce the word yet. That would take decades before the words would come. First, I had to learn to read. When I did, I was voracious, I couldn’t stop reading. My life was shaped by a world of books and then I discovered Scholastic book services where you could buy books for $.10 each so I babysat and did chores for my neighbors. Every task was equal to dime, every task equaled a book. Sometimes I bought books by the armload and then the kids made fun of me saying I couldn’t possibly have read them all. But by week’s end, I had read a months worth of books, and they had read none. We had no TV. Anyway I digress from my story, I finally figured out the pattern of my birthdays. A one day shift for every day of the week, plus 3 more days, to compensate for the three years between leap years, and the pattern emerged. After the table was cleared I anticipated my birthday cake. I hoped it was chocolate. I had my fingers crossed. I waited eagerly as they put the pies on the table, pumpkin, apple, lemon merengue— I turned them all down, but no chocolate cake appeared. I burst into tears. Everyone fell silent, even the crystal, and the wine glasses were silent. And then my mother realized it was my birthday, it was my birthday. And she, even she had forgotten me. I was ten. Story of my life. So much for perpetual calendars. A lot of good that did. 

8/24 Annika Fajardo, writing for children Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event

IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S GARDEN

I was thinking of my grandmother 

who was more practical than prosaic, 

how she loved the fragments of beauty 

that the voracious deer didn’t devour.

It was a running battle with the roses, 

that climbed up the trees to escape their hunger.

What survived was whatever the deer wouldn’t eat.

Remember the daphne, with its variegated leaves, 

and the narcotic odor of lily-of-the-valley?

The deer ignored the poker plant on the bank. 

The pyracantha and hawthorn grew twisted

like the bay tree, to avoid their appetite.

It seems that the deer hankered after anything blue. 

Borage, forget-me-nots, violets, and houndstongue

slid down their throats in seconds flat.

Sometime my grandmother would hike up the hill 

to transplant wildflowers in the garden, 

wild irises and poppies guarded the lettuce beds

and hidden chard prayed among the rhubarb & potatoes.

She preferred the down-to-earth aspects of the garden

that fed us. She, having raised eight children, 

was a practical woman, and I was her ninth child, 

my half-brother, Guy, who arrived in a bassinet 

left on the doorstep one hot summer morning, 

was her 10th child. Then came along my cousin David 

for weeks at a stretch, followed by his sister, Sinead—

That brought it up to an even dozen children she raised.

Hunger was always at the forefront of her mind,

having inherited survivor’s guilt from the Irish Famine.

She lived on a half-pension, barely making ends meet. 

But we never wanted for food, or beauty either. 

It was never about yet another mouth to feed. 

She tended and cared for her plants, life was hard.

But she lived out the end of her days, mulching

and tumping and banking the soil, turning it,

in the garden of her grandchildren.

8/24 Write On! With Susie Terence