FIRST LIGHT

The year my grandfather died, 

we left the city and moved to the country. 

It was only the two of us left, the family scattered.

We were leaving behind the old family house 

once filled with a dozen people, 

with memories stashed on every landing, 

the hidy-holes and forgotten treasures—

my favorite armless ragdoll. Once my mother’s.

The new house, really an old summer shack, 

lined with sleeping porches, was hardened for winter, 

the Wedgewood iron firebox glowed, 

heating only the kitchen with a nimbus of woodsmoke.

The rest of the house was an icebox.

We watched our breath create ghosts that followed us, 

then disappeared into the woodwork, 

only to be joined by errant brethren and kin.

We tucked ourselves in closer to the woodstove 

until the morning sun cresting the ridge, 

sliced through the air, illuminating us in the kitchen, 

dazzling us with its brilliance,

the curtains drawn back to capture that first light.

2/23/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class

Selling the city house

prose meanderings for next poem

I am sure there were moments when I felt cherished as a child. But when I think back on the details of my early life, it was a constant upheaval of movement, water circling the drain. My grandfather‘s death brought about the first major shift, the city Victorian was sold, the aunts and uncles scattered in all directions. The cavernous house that had sheltered many lives, with its basement flat for my aunt and uncle, the marble steps leading to the first floor where the kitchen and the living room were separated by a large paneled foyer, with pocket doors—and the serpentine stairwell that led to the top floor—really the attic filled with bedrooms that my mother and two aunts shared. The house sold. It’s hard to imagine eight kids raised in that old house, it must’ve been filled to the rafters with noise. Four boys on one side, four girls on the other side. The uncles all moved out after they were drafted, fully fledged, but the all the aunts all stayed in the family home, including my mother. With two married couples, one in the basement, with its own kitchen, it was still a crowded house. I don’t remember my father ever being in that house, but I suppose he was. After the city house was sold, we had briefly moved down the road from my grandmother’s summer house, to live in Speck McAuliffe’s apartments in Lagunitas. I don’t know how long we lived there, not long, because my father disappeared soon after, and I was packed up and sent to live with my grandmother on Barranca Road.

Two bags full

I was a kindergarten dropout so I had low social skills. Desperate for a playmate, I decided to visit a little girl down the road, even when she was a year younger than me, and not in my class. I was young, perhaps five-going-on-six, and I want to play with my neighbor down the road. But I didn’t know what to bring, so I loaded up two shopping bags with my most precious toys. Stephanie, who graduated from kindergarten, met me at the end of her driveway, the halfway mark. The bags must’ve been heavy as I had set them down to catch my breath. Her father said something under his breath, I didn’t understand his remark, but it was probably a derogatory aside, probably something about being a young bag lady in training. Les Stone was overly protective of Stephanie, who was a year younger than me, a year and two days to be exact. I was so pleased to finally have a playmate my age. Billy Joe Bianchi was two years older than me, and didn’t want to play with girls. His sister, Cottie moved away when Joe and Irene divorced. So I lived alone at the end of the road. I was willing to put up with shame, for I did feel shame—as I knew on some level Stephanie’s father was making fun of me. He always thought I was a bad influence on her because I had no visible parents, only a grandmother. But Steph and I became inseparable blood sisters. I don’t remember what was in the bags. If I were to peek inside those two bags now, they were the kind with rolled twine handles—like the ones from Macy’s, not grocery store bags. One bag was filled with doll parts and doll clothes. The other held my art supplies. A watercolor set, crayons, a coloring book, and the treasured detritus of childhood. A china tea set, with pieces missing, a rag doll, and other oddities. Hoarding began at an early age. I learn to compartmentalize, to categorize my belongings as it seems that I was always on the run. Of course I was, the break-up of family, my grandfather’s death, selling the city house, the aunts in the uncles scattered. My mother‘s marriage falling apart at the seams, my father‘s disappearance into the neck of the bottle. I arrived at the house at the end of the road with bags that I never unpacked—eventually evolving into the go-bag of today, a necessity during a time of wildfires. I began early, isolating parts of myself. Baggage, excavating my past.

2/17/22 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

URBAN RENEWAL

URBAN RENEWAL

I used to dream the Bay Area was surrounded by snowcapped peaks, 

and I wondered which mountain range I was channeling. 

San Francisco was home, my natal ground,

but wanderlust took me to the Sierra Nevada range,

then north to Seattle, Vancouver, and Horseshoe Bay, 

and then up-island to isolated fishing hamlets, Naniamo, 

Uclulet on the mailboat, we drove to Tofino on dirt roads 

before there was a gringo trail. 

I remember walking along the bluffs below Pike Street Market 

where the native people slept it off from the night before, 

they were littered along the railroad tracks like strange pinnipeds.

The forgotten ones filled the jails, and a nation turned its back 

on the indigent and those of fragile mind and body, 

pushed for urban renewal to clean up the riffraff for once and for all.

The detritus of the past, swept away like a tidal wave before our eyes.

In Vancouver BC, first Gastown, and then Chinatown disappeared.

The streets of Ferndale and Eureka, steam-cleaned. 

There was nowhere else left for the indigent to go. 

Folks rejoiced waiting for fresh-eyed tourists to arrive.

The Marin architect that cleaned up Ghirardelli Square, 

blueprinted the way with cookie-cutter plans for urban renewal.

The underbellies of cities, gutted like fish, stripped of psyche.

It was like an echo, the cavernous gods of tourism, each town

lost more than an inconvenient eyesore. Now, across America,

malls, dressed in brick façades and quaint lamp posts, lie fallow, 

a wasteland of tourist dollars with shops selling teeshirts 

as if to prove residency, and bright trinkets made in China. 

Meanwhile, the indigent moved uptown to sleep on street corners.

Those mountains in my dreams, they were in mourning, 

protecting those who grew up in their shadow.

2/16/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.

On finding an old spoon hanging on an old fenceline on Valentine’s Day

As we were pulling what seemed like acres of invasive scotch broom in the lower garden, my cousin found an old teaspoon attached to the fence, bent and gnarled, and green with the patina of age, as most of the silver-plating had long since sloughed off the spoon. Because the base metal was copper, I knew it was a very old spoon. More than a century old. 

The design had a crest and a big silver trophy bowl at mid-handle—like the classical trophies filled with champagne and red roses that race horses won—perhaps a depiction of the Grecian urn filled with fruit, but it was so worn, it was hard to tell. If the crest had an initial, it too was worn away. 

Once this cutlery was part of a matched set that graced a linen tablecloth in some genteel hotel. Probably pinched by someone, then later lost, or set free. It looks as if the spoon was used as a hand tool to tighten the baling wire along the fence line. Sounds like something I might have done long ago. Or maybe it tossed out in a paper napkin, into the fireplace, after evening tea with Irish sodabread, and dumped in the garden along with the ashes, and later hung on the fence like a trophy, or a wind chime. You must admit, finding a bent teaspoon hanging from an old fenceline is in want of some sort of explanation.

Was it a piece of cutlery from the original owner, a railroad man, who kept his silver in a hidey-hole beneath the kitchen floor that was later to become my bedroom? Much of our worn silverware came from that hidey-hole and we continued to use it through the generations even when most of the silver had long since worn off the bottom of the cutlery, imparting an acrid brassy taste in your mouth if you ate homemade blackberry jam right off the spoon with your tea.

I straightened out the old spoon as best I could to read the manufacturer’s mark. Initials and the words Pure Silverplate, as if you’d be fooled into thinking it was solid silver, and then you’d have to pinch it to augment your income. As we stood there catching our breath and contemplating its age, we heard a shuffling sound in the shrubbery below the embankment. 

Thinking it was a deer or dog, I peered over the edge to find a porker, somebody’s pet pig. She was heavily furred with black with brown and russet splotches—perhaps denoting some Russian wild boar ancestry. When she heard me, she came over to investigate, snortling and chuffing with pleasure, pulling at the bunchgrass while eyeing us like a hungry horse looking for treats, and grunting all the while, but I could not translate, nor parse her guttural sentences. Perhaps it was a love poem or a serenade about apples delivered by a wandering minstrel pig. She was obviously a long way from home and was glad to see us. That much was obvious. 

We were glad to see her, if only to cach our breath, as we were two old weed wenches pulling broom. Perhaps she was charmed by the sound of our voices—we always talk to animals—as we are all one thing. There is no separation between us and them. Even the blasted invasive scotch broom. And we caught our breath, our hearts were a little lighter because of that brief encounter with an errant pig, and we got back to work pulling broom. The pig ambled off, clattered down the road on her little pink hooves, looking for home, snuffling and grunting all the while. The old spoon in my back pocket for luck.

Making mudpies

Love meets the dirt. I am slovenly, yet strangely OCD. When I’m in the zone, I’m messy, Pigpen ain’t got nothing on me. But when I’m in my procrastinator mode, then I’m a clean freak. Sometimes I wonder if I’m on the spectrum. When I was a child, I was mesmerized by mud. I had a small summer mudhole where I patted my feet like a duck. Mud pies were a speciality. I’d haul out my doll  china tea set, and serve fresh baked mud pies with my water tea. Did I attempt to eat them? Probably. I loved their sleek surface, how the clay slip rose to the surface and filled in the grit. Later, when I became a potter, it was like making so many mud pies all over again. I was happiest when I was covered in mud. I was in my element, covered in mud, I was a grubbucket to the core. But that fastidious side could also arise, and then it was about issues of control. I was afraid to let go, I hated the mud baths in Calistoga. I couldn’t wait to get out as soon as possible. I felt so smothered. So much for a Valentine’s gift, it was not romantic at all. I felt like I was being strangled, and it was an apt metaphor for the end of that relationship. I have found that the best way to clean a house was to have a deadline, I am a true procrastinator. Those moments of vacancy. I am always in a state of flux, many half-finished projects rime my room with detritus, a cart of negatives to scan, another cart of sewing projects, mostly mending the past. Stacks of books unread, important papers. A tea cart and snacks, a bowl of favorite rocks, copper canisters, my art supplies and everything all kitted up, fastidiously portable and ready to go. I am still in the go-bag mode, after so many years of living with wildfires. My day pack is a go-bag, my car is a go-bag. I could easily live a week, and teach classes with all the stuff stashed in my car. I am collecting small segments of past lives to fund, in case I lose the rest, a bag lady to the very end.

2/11/22 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

CURSING THE DEAD

CURSING THE DEAD

My grandmother cursed Cromwell daily. 

She cursed the Anglo-Saxons, then relented, 

saying their children were so like angels, 

with their blonde hair and blue eyes, 

so like angels, she said, tisk-tisking.

It was years before I realized she was cursing the long dead, 

those oppressors of the past who were her daily tormentors, 

they were the backdrop of her living history.  

Never forget, she said. Drougheda, she said, 

Barbados, Jamaica. They sold our children, she said.

In this way, I learned how the sins of oppression 

stained the generations. This is how I learned my history, 

through the rough lens of her curses and laments.

Even in San Francisco, immigrants were ostracized.

No Irish need apply. They formed revolutionary social clubs, 

the KRB Hall was a cover for gunrunning to Ireland. 

The 1916 Uprising was in the marrow of their bones. 

I remember she said the Americans called her a cow

on the street, and refused to give her a seat on the tram— 

though she was nine-months pregnant with her firstborn 

when her water broke. She cried for shame after all these years, 

she still cried, and I was a secret witness to her grief. 

That the oppressor wasn’t just her generation. 

When the nuns came to school, they asked us Catholics 

to raise their hands. We were new fodder in their gunsights.

And the ostracism began anew. We weren’t welcome 

at the Improvement Club pool, we might dirty the water.

Nor was I wanted in the Bluebirds, by then lesson learned,

I knew better than to join the Rainbow Girls.

We weren’t the right kind of daughters, 

we weren't the Daughters of the American Revolution. 

We were part of another kind of revolution in progress 

who couldn’t let go of the past, who couldn’t forgive or forget. 

I was a child of two worlds—an outsider to the Anglo world

a hostile witness to that grief my grandmother carried.

I didn't know we were all championing some form of segregation.

The Us/Them model kept us all apart. Kept us warring.

Meanwhile, on the news we learned that in Selma, Alabama,

they were marching, marching. Neighbors boarded buses.

Some didn't come back. That was when the riots began.

A man spoke, I have a dream. And the world came undone. 

I didn't realize it was all the same struggle.

2/9/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.

A BLT for the horse

One afternoon I was eating a rare treat, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich—something I had recently discovered. My old horse Chiquita, who was grazing on the grass around the front of the house, was so used to sharing snacks with me that she reached over and snatched my sandwich right out of my hand, and gobbled it up. I was stunned as I had barely taken a bite. When she hit a strip of bacon, she was surprised and began nodding her head for all she was worth, because I don’t think she’d ever experienced bacon, or any meat, before in her life. But it was salty and she liked that. See, it all began innocently enough. We used to collect day-old bread from Bordenave and Lombardi bakeries and feed it to the animals. So she thought anything that resembled a loaf of French bread was for her. She looked like Winston Churchill in the war-room with a cigar in his mouth, as she tilted her head sideways, and got a dreamy look in her eyes, whenever she ate those loaves of French bread. Her sidekick, Winky the cat, was standing on his hind legs, wanting in on the action, got a piece of bacon for his efforts.

The mountain of many names (photos)

The mountain of many names. This iconic mountain in West Marin once had a Miwok name, but that is lost. Dewey says it’s Oyen Mucsis, but no one really knows. It has had many, many settler names. The Russian names and the Californio names are lost. James Black was merely an owner, so it was called Black’s Mountain. As in the man who paid the taxes. It was a name on a geodetic map. We never used it because we didn’t even know it was his mountain. In those days, who had geodetic maps? Who can own a view like that?

As it lay dreaming, it was variously called Knuckle Mountain, Sleeping Elephant, and Elephant Foot Mountain, that’s what we called it when I was ten, and Marin hadn’t yet been invaded by the rockstars—so we can’t blame them. From the top of Mt. Barnabe, it looks like an elephant’s foot. An elephant dreaming of the sea.

As for the current coloquial name Elephant Mountain, it was called that long before Jesse Colin Young moved to Inverness and named his album after it in deep homage. Banana of the Youngbloods knows the backstory, he confirmed to me that a local, Hannah Bauer, gave them the name. (NB Hannah grew up in Sausalito.)

And yes, there were once elephants here, once upon a time, both mastodons and mammoths—and they grazed on the lush sweet grasses of the verdant lush plains that rolled all the way out to the Farallon Islands. They wore the rocks smooth itching their butts near Goat Rock. And then they all died. 

But the mountain that arose from the depths as pillow lava, is sleepwalking towards the sea. It endures our the fog of our transgressions, it forgives us our erosion of names, and still it feeds our imaginations. This mountain of many names.

From a Facebook photo post, you can see it here, but for this blog I used my latest iteration of the mountain.

• BLACK MOUNTAIN
• Channeling the clouds on Elephant Mountain
• Three views of Elephant Mountain (drawings)
• Two colored pencil drawings, Elephant Mountain, 
• Two pastels, Elephant Mountain
• Black Mountain after the fire (colored pencil drawing 
• Elephant Mountain & fog, (colored pencil drawing)
• 
  
  
  
  

This old house

The old house in limbo, decades after her death, is in purgatory. The floorboards have given up their tiles to reveal buckled plywood that sheds layers like the pages of a book, a story of word and wind.

I remember my uncles, one just home from the Korean War,  pounding nails into the joists as I peered down into the basement below. I was fascinated with the darkness hidden beneath our feet, as we walked from bedroom to kitchen, past the expanse of living room to dining room, and the front door. I must’ve been looking out that door into the summer light as I headed toward the kitchen, my toes finding a jagged edge of wood as I thrust a bare foot forward.

Perhaps I was hungry or just careless but the splinter buried so deep that bright blood blossomed like poppies in Flander’s Field.

I don’t remember who removed that sprinter, my grandmother or an aunt, it was large. When we say splinter we think of something small. But this was massive, larger than a needle, more like a pencil, but that may have been an exaggeration. I was young.

But my blood was written on those floorboards, and in that sacrifice, I opened up a part of myself and let the darkness in, the floor spoke of time passing. It wasn’t the original floor of the old house, but a copy, subjected to the idea of modernization.

CHAOS COORDINATOR

She said, pick something ordinary 

and see it as if for the first time. 

On the nightstand, a homely cylinder ascends space, 

a hollow well for for morning tea, a cistern of thought, 

a place where I dwell, mornings, as I begin the day’s journey. 

The handle sticks out like a sore ear, I’m listening to the air.

Sometimes in my hand blocks the sound 

as I raise it closer to my lips, it whispers secret assignations, 

and it carries the burden of proof that morning has arrived, 

and that I have survived yet another night. 

When I am done, it shakes its mane like a lion 

as if to greet the open savannah ahead. 

With its speckled skin glaze, it’s a reverse map of the stars.

It says Chaos Coordinator etched in gold, and indeed it is.

2/5/22 From Patrice Veccione’s Write Your Eyes Open Zoom workshop

Hot water in the house

When I was young, we had a small Spark stove in butter-colored enamel on shapely celadon cabriole legs associated with Queen Anne or Chippendale furniture. It had a gallon kerosine jug (an old repurposed paisano wine jug) for fuel that hung on the top left side of the stove that went glug-glug-glug when the burner was lit. I used to lie on the floor with my legs under the stove, where it was warm, and watch the bubbles rise. It had an oven and a woodbox too. I remember my grandmother boiling the weekly bathwater in an old oval copper tub that would be worth a bomb today. She eventually replaced the old stove with a 1940s Wedgewood which was way more modern. It had matching salt and pepper shakers and a clock that didn’t work. But that was OK as we were entrenched in another time. We had to get a propane tank to go with it. And with that we finally had hot water in the house.

2/3/22

FIRST LOVE

FIRST LOVE

     —after Billy Collins' Going Out for Cigarettes

The story goes, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Nothing famous about it. One day, he 

walked out, moved back to the suburbs. 

They took him in, swallowed him up,

it was a slow suicide of self. 

I never heard from him again, 

not a letter, not a phone call, nada. 

I mourned for what was lost. 

It was as if those seven years were for naught. 

In seven years our cells replace themselves. 

We were not the same—even though seven years 

was a marriage sentence of sorts. He left me in spring 

when the words began to rise like first sap.

He left me when I became a writer, 

as if the words themselves were unfaithful wives. 

As if I needed the corpse of experience to hone 

and sharpen my nascent sullied craft.

Decades later, his first girlfriend, Dulcie—

whom he had left for me, 

and then in a boomerang move, 

he left me again for her—we became friends, 

we shared war stories that mirrored each other.

We were sisters of the same cloth, 

rent with holes and jagged three-corner tears. 

It was as if Bob had become a lost vanishing point, 

a two-point perspective laid down in lead,

the horizon-line on an architectural drawing, 

disappearing into the infinite, off the edges of the page,

only to reappear in the house of memory 

like a möbius strip endlessly repeating its cycle.

But theses days, no one can hide forever.

We found him on the Internet. The woman he married 

looked a lot like me, but her sullen face said it all.

Needing to put old dogs to rest, Dulcie wrote to him, 

but silence was the loud reply. What did she expect?

You can't teach an old dog....

However, his sister was delighted to hear from us,

as he had given her the cold shoulder too—

just like he gave us so many years ago.

A family gift from his long dead father.

We put Bob to rest that day, no more 

dog-eared pages or sticky forays into the past.

Some 40 years later, I’m still wedded to my word-wives,

those dark rubies glistening like blood.

2/2/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class  First final draft.