TO BEE A FLOWER

To be a flower is a profound responsibility. 

So much depends upon whether or not one has already gone to seed, 

or set seed, even if the bees forgot to visit. It’s one big sex race. 

Finally, I’m old enough to let today be today and not be tomorrow,

or let memory attempt to set back the clock of regret. 

4/1/22 NaPoWriMo

DEMI-GLOSA AFTER A FEW FRAGMENTS OF EMILY’S

Glosa after Emily‘s elliptical lines

So Emily once said forever might be short
and since I’ve been short forever, barely reaching 

my own lofty height, proscribed or otherwise. 

And if to be an elder means pain, I am old enough today.
I’ve got the pain part down cold after a shovel incident,
I eat CBDs and sleep on a heating pad of misplaced desire.

And, I think I’ve got the old part down as well, as I’m pushing 70.
Emily said, the second half of joy is always shorter than the first—
by far, because you already know what to expect, don’t you?

3/31/22 NaPoWriMo

BETWEEN WORLDS

1. The day dawned, smoky and sultry, 

as I prepared for a poetry reading, 

As I stepped over the lintel, I heard the news… 

The sky stopped, my hand froze on the doorknob. 

I was halfway between worlds, 

a liminal portal, a threshold. A day where 

we could never go back to who or where we were. 

Our days were spent in speechless horror 

as we watched one atrocity after another unfold

again and again on phosphor screens the world over. 

The images, indelibly etched on our retinas, 

of people falling falling from the sky, afire,

an image I would revisit again in my mind’s eye. 

Strangers holding hands as they fell that morning. 

All that blue sky above them like a flawless quilt. 

The thick dust settling like a blanket over them. 

My heart in my throat, the vertigo that followed. 

I was never so afraid of heights 

until that moment frozen in time.

2. To this day I cannot shake the image 

of those random couples falling from the sky, 

holding hands, as they plummeted from great heights, 

as there was nowhere else left for them to go. 

So they plummeted like birds of prey 

toward the solace of the ground.

Sometimes I imagine 

that we have wings inside our bodies, 

held prisoner by a cage of ribs and viscera.

Late afternoon we visited a woman 

in the Berkeley Hills who was at Ground Zero. 

The afternoon light flooded the room 

and the piano keys glistened and smiled, 

a melody that fell silent so many years ago. 

Later, I heard how she had died, 

having inhaled too much death that day. 

It came back to claim her. 

Those interior wings of desire.

3. Sometimes when I am at great heights, 

I imagine wings transporting me 

across a great chasm, like that thin landbridge 

on the crest between Mount Whitney and King’s Canyon. 

I peered down into forever, watched carrion birds 

circling the updraft with wingspans taller than me, 

the feathers of my inner wings 

tickling the back of my throat until I coughed 

and spluttered, gasping for breath, 

those wings that kept me aloft.

4. The sisters separated us in church 

to keep us from disrupting the mass, 

saying that we needed to leave enough room 

for our personal guardian angels. 

I thought it grandiose but I became obsessed 

with the spaces between us, not knowing 

which side s/he sat on, and did that mean 

we needed to leave enough room 

for two angels to sit side by side? Were they hes or shes?

Suddenly the sparsely populated pew seemed overcrowded.

Parishioners glared at us for taking up so much space.

And then I began to worry about how much room 

they needed for their wings and could they even sit?

Could their wings even be folded back to fit the pew? 

Or were they relegated to a life of standing around 

watching snotnosed brats rather than soaring the skies

or taking up dancing on the heads of pins?

5. How far have I fallen? The mighty Mo, 

having tumbled from great heights, she, 

having dangled her legs from great precipices, 

contemplates the fall from youth into old age. 

The time my horse took the bit in her teeth

as we barreled up the fire road, her head in my lap, 

flecks of saliva, foam and blood covering me 

as the bit cut deep into her tongue. 

My penance, to cleanse the stickers from her tongue 

cauterizing it was silver nitrate. 

The cost of speed, asking a racehorse to run, 

 not being able to control her, the blood lust was up 

and the adrenaline pummeled her heart 

so she felt no pain that day and the wind had wings 

but the crash landing brought us back to earth. 

The overwhelming guilt and grief. 

6. The mezzanine is a midway place between below and above. 

A kind of purgatory of our own choosing.

7. We had climbed an old oak overhanging the creek, 

my aunt walked out the mossy limb. 

I stood to follow, but I was four and lost my footing. 

The rocks in the gorge below gnashed their teeth. 

She grabbed me by the arms, hauled me over the rough bark 

like a sack of potatoes to the safety of the branch. 

My armpits were bleeding. My granny treated my wounds 

with zinc oxide and the cats were terribly interested. 

Afterwards, at Speck’s Bar, a stranger tried to pick me up 

to raise me up to his eye level, but I screamed and screamed. 

The man startled, dropped me, until my aunt explained. 

The Shirley Temples used to assuage my pain 

were as crimson as blood of Christ. 

Where was my guardian angel that day when I needed her? 

Was she more earthbound, or did she merely abandon me?

And what about my aunt saving me from the rocks below?

3/30/22 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass

DITHEROTOMY

He drove his Honda Odyssey so slowly
thru the Fairfax intersection,
it was as if he was taking pious instruction
from a page of the Book of Ditherotomy.

AN OFFERING

    —after Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrenda

        For John Oliver Simon

I offer you these two scarred hands,

palms up, holding the sign of the letter K,

cupped hands to drink from the spring.

Or a gift of letters etched on the farthest shore.

I have nothing to give but these empty shells

of words, unvarnished, dressed in sheepskin 

and stardust at twilight. A distant congress 

of ravens deep in primeval forests, where 

forgotten totems still dream of the ancestors.

Te amo, he once said, long ago.

If I could, I would offer you these old hiking boots 

& socks, once shot through with silver and dawn light,

that once took us to the heights of Machu Picchu.

We’d go back to the lowest place on this continent, 

to where the pupfish still swim in Salt Creek.

We’d revisit the umbligo of Death Valley, where the spirit level 

seeks equilibrium with the lofty heights, that wilderness

of spires that puncture the blueness of the sky.

Yo también, I answered.

In this wilderness where we are only visitors, 

where life is insignificant, a sliver of the past,

where memory sleeps, then reinvents itself

when we scry our unborn poems on the lake

that offers them up to the wind. Small sacrifices.

I have nothing left to give you except these worn words, 

so like hummingbirds building nests of spiderwebs,

hope, and thistle-down over Palo Verde Creek.

These words still seeking an audience with your ear. 

Remember, 

I will always love you, said the darkness.

Te amo, mi amor, I said.

MORNING AUBADE

Outside the window of the old house, 

slumped glass distorts the morning light 

that illumines the matins of the buckeye buds,

like a rippled Monet painting of water lilies. 

The stippled grass and filtered light is painted

with myriad strokes of unmeasurable greenness—

no wonder my grandmother loved this place 

of bright spring grass, flanked by meadow and gully,

a reminder of home, in another country, 

of what was lost, the idea of homeland, 

a country she could never return to, 

not even as she worked the garden, now unkempt,

a place carved deep in the thickets of the heart.

3/23/22 CPITS Write On! with Terri Glass

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

BUCKEYE BUDS UNDER AN OPEN SKY

Each spring I await the opening 

of the first buckeye leaves. Palmate 

fists stretch and unfurl their buds 

as if in supplication, 

that greeny prayer to the turning of the year. 

Palms together, they pray to the sky 

and to the returning light. 

Then, as the days grow longer, 

they begin to unfurl, 

offering small green hands, palms up, 

as if a gift to the sky and air, 

opening up into starfish promises 

until the trees are filled with offerings. 

Then, the formation of small buds, 

becoming vestal tapers to light the way

to the impossible blue vault of sky, 

redolent with the sweet narcotic scent 

the delicate blossoms, ladened with pale hues,

blooms no less complicated than orchids, 

their stamens like curious whiskers 

entice the honeybees in to drink deep, 

only to die from that fatal ambrosia,

the mad honey’s revenge 

on the footsoldiers of the hives. 

A case where unexpected death occurs 

when two incompatible systems collide.

Not so much for the native bumblebees 

who sip and suck the buckeye with delight, 

their sonorous song, a drone that fills the air

with the returning victory of spring.

& again, we are on the brink of yet another war.

3/16/22 CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence

Reward reality check

So, in years past, I bought a microwave, electronics, a nice camera, but this year I think I’ll buy a tank of gas with my Costco Rewards check. A friend said: Good luck getting through the lines at the pumps before next year's check arrives... Well, a year later, the price of gas has dropped a little bit, but not enough. Somebody is still making vast profits. Price gouging—there is no shortage. This year my Costco rewards check went for food since the price has been going up like crazy, supposedly because of fuel, inflation. No matter how you cut it, we’re all sitting ducks, or is it stool pigeons, aren’t we? Don’t even get me started on trying to score toilet paper.

TRAFFIC JAM

Massive traffic jam in the commute lane,

amidst construction, cars stalled in all four directions,

at the foot of University Avenue and the Berkeley Marina,

where three wild turkey toms celebrated annual spring rites, 

with gallopavo powwows right in the middle of the intersection, 

tracking the sun with splayed iridescent fantails, chest-bumping 

rivals into submission while the unimpressed hens look on.

3/10/22

Teaching in a time of plague

Yesterday, a young student asked if he could see my face. I obliged, pulling my mask down, smiling wide, and said, is this what you were expecting? I asked if they could tell when I was smiling when I had my mask on. They said they could see, yes yes yes. They said that my eyebrows spoke volumes. My eyes also  smiled. Ironic, that wearing masks, the equivalent of a Middle Eastern burkah, allows us the opportunity to read each other’s eyes.

PAINT ME IN TENDER MORNING LIGHT

Paint me in tender morning light with nectarine skies. 

Paint me in lapis lazulite veined with pyrite and gold.

Paint me like the virgin with her celestial robes so blue. 

Paint me in ultramarine, the ocean’s final promise, 

so that I may know the soothing sound of the sea. 

Paint me a starry night or a severed ear like a nascent shell.

Paint me paradise with blossoms the color of midnight. 

Paint me blue verging on violet. Paint me in indigo and woad.

Paint me the iridescent throat of the hummingbird,

Huitzilipochtli, the god of war, and the bringer of luck.

Paint us in the colors of the Ukraine. Paint a trident for Kali.

Paint us in blue for endless summer skies and yellow sunflowers 

with blue-eyed cornflowers hidden in the golden wheat.

Paint me a heart made of lapis and turquoise and silver and gold,

and let not my old love lose that heart. And yet he did.

Paint me in waves of lupine foam, poppies cresting the hillsides,

and with sky pilot from the secret summer of mountain passes. 

Paint me in imaginary colors. Paint me anadrio for good luck.

And paint me the color of the wind on the day of your birth. 

Paint me with the knife of sunset slashing the edges of night. 

3/7/22 CPITS in class poem Hamilton AFB, Novato

RANDOM COMMUTE NOTES

Stuck behind in traffic—
Timid two-footed driver in a new SUV.
Think I’ll take the long way home.

Children of migrant workers,
newly landed, in federal housing,
pregnant mothers in used SUVs
dropping off rafts of children,
who have no basic language skills
in Spanish or in English
or in any language,
except that of the heart.
I fear for their future.
Their dreams are small.

Why is it people driving expensive cars
assume that you will just make room for them
as they merge into you, defying physics?
Every one of them, BMWs doing 60 in a 40 mph zone.
How did they become so privileged
to endanger the lives of road workers?
Those who have so much care for so little.
Teslas, BMWs, VW and Cadillac SUVs.
Social equivalent of invading tank army on the road.

These days, everyone has an SUV.
Those of us in small, economical cars,
are routinely shoved off the road, run aground
and into the guard rails by drivers who can’t see us.
We are the new invisible people.

I pass a huge truck with the words Pegasus
emblazoned on the back, no wings on the swan.
Another flatbed truck filled with massive bags of dirt,
as if giants had gone shopping at Costco.

There are days I leave my iPad notes running,
to take notes as I drive down the road.
Am I taking dictation from the gods of the automobile industry? 

BMWs doing 85  in a 40 mph zone. Privilege at its worst.
And we wonder how we got here.

Along frontage roads, the disenfranchised
park their dilapidated motorhomes.
No rest anywhere for the poor.
In Berkeley, the freeway overpasses
have become the land of Sharia law 

for those who are displaced.
The rubble reaches mountain high,
no place to put the garbage.
So much garbage that even a dumpster
would be overwhelmed in no time flat.
The detritus of civilization survives us
as the homeless move onto yet another encampment.

And there’s that same lone fuckwad Tesla driver
in the commute lane meant for carpools.
Every single driver abusing the law, 

and every car is a BMW or a Tesla.
Can you spell white male privilege in action?

At the Golden Gate Fields on-ramp
I watch jockeys breezing their thoroughbreds,
sometimes two at a time, one being ponied,
others galloping against the direction of the track. 

They are glad to feel the morning breeze.

Even the trucks have joined in the supersize me
automobile race. Everyone with their double cabs
and double-wide wheels commuting to work.
It’s not like they need all that horsepower
in order to drive down the freeway.
We snivel about the price of gas
yet continue to drive our gas hogs. Lemmings.

My new favorite commute word
seems to be asshole asshole asshole.
I drive across three counties in order to teach children
poetry during this time of Covid.
Trying to find balance when the scales themselves
have been thrown out.
Trying to find balance during a time of pandemic
is difficult because the scales themselves have been discarded. 

Sometimes I drop off food at the Berkeley encampments,
knowing that many have no source of food.
The supreme irony, parked at a homeless camp,
SUVs and massive pickup trucks with double cabs.
Homelessness is a virus spreading throughout our cities.
Berkeley is particularly hard hit. Councilmembers talk
about what to do, while doing nothing at all.

People stake out postage-stamp yards 

in their homeless encampment using police tape. 

One encampment has a rickshaw replete with buggy. 

Another encampment builds walls of made of tarps.
Some semblance of the old life persists like memory

in this dystopian Mad-Max world.

Meanwhile, at yet another construction site,
high-rises for the high pollutants
while the homeless continue to sleep 

under the overpasses.

3/4/22

UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG

       —With thanks to Nâzim Hikmet’s Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

It’s summer, 1989, I’m standing in the back 

of the old wood-panel theater, filled to the rafters with comrades, 

filled with the sultry August heat and sweat, while outside 

the open windows, linden trees conspiratorially whisper 

the secrets of the air to the dank river.

Our oppressive clothing, like the local KGB, sticks to us like glue. 

Minoga ludi, says Oleg, my interpreter. 

Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best 

                   though it is not Sunday. No church bells tolling.

                   I am a visitor, not a tourist, I am bearing witness.

                   An Irish-American poet lost in the land of fields.

In the corner, stands the obligatory red flag of the USSR, 

soaked in the blood poppies of the fallen, 

       with its golden hammer and sickle, that reaped more 

                 than a harvest of wheat.

On the stage, Cossack dancers in red boots

             lash out with their feet, while an old man recites 

                    Taras Shevshenko’s verses 

to the strands of the balalika. A hush falls over the room 

as two maidens join him onstage, 

they are dressed in national costume 

     with wheat fronds in their floral headdresses like a halo

                or a nimbus cloud catching the last light of the sun. 

They carry something old and tasseled, on a pole,

       and as they unroll it, the audience gasps. 

             This is treason, said Oleg, despite Glasnost.

             But there are too many of us to be disappeared 

             during these halcyon days of open-armed Glasnost.

             I repeat, I am bearing witness. I am bearing witness

as I watch

a flag that was hidden, silenced for nearly 75 years, unfurl. 

Blue for the sky and the cornflowers in the fields, 

and yellow for the endless wheat and the sunflowers. 

The lustrous silk quivers and glistens in the limelight,

takes center stage as if it were about to sing an aria. 

              And so it did. Words once uttered, cannot be unsung.

                     There is no taking it back. The road goes ever onward.

I have some questions: who kept that flag safe all those years 

and how was it hidden from the aggressor? In what attic, or dacha?

In what Peredelkino? First, they came for the poets….

A call to poetry is a call to arms. 

                                They are one and the same, said my friend.

The silence in the room was astounding, no one dared breathe. 

And then one old voice began to warble the strains 

of the Ukrainian national anthem. 

         Another voice, also hoary and frail with age, joined him. 

Soon, others joined in, at first, hesitantly, mouthing the words,

       and then they sang with vigor and gusto, as they dusted off 

                  the words unsung for a nearly three-quarters of a century. 

We had witnessed something holy and profound. 

The word was on everyone’s lips 

          though not all knew the anthem. 

                And that day, there was no going back. 

I didn’t know I loved the way that old flag unfurled, 

or the way that paper sheath, stained with age, crackled like fire,

or the way the dustmotes trapped in the floodlights 

took on the twilight of the stars. Sometimes, the road stops here.

And there are things you can no longer retreat from.

It’s February 28, 2022, as Russian tanks wend their way 

towards the heart of the motherland, all roads lead to Kyiv, 

the ludi running ahead of those tanks, removed all the road signs,

they blew up the bridges, sacrificing their lives, 752 civilians dead.

Electronic road signs & billboards, uploaded with words in red lights:

Go fuck yourselves! до росії на хуя. Go back to Russia on your dicks.

You cannot cross the same river even once, said the Dnipro River.

Gospodi. There is no going back. Naked aggression comes 

in the form of Russian airstrikes on civilians. Putin is a whore-

cum-war criminal dressed in his Sunday-best despotic czar fatigues.

                Ukrainian soldiers are bringing their cats to the Russian front.

                Grannies lying on yoga mats, lock & load & aim their AK-47s. 

                Meanwhile, in the Kyiv subway-stations-cum-bomb-shelters, 

                babies are being born, a set of twins, oldtimers play chess,

                mothers & children make Molotov cocktails with laundry soap

                for sticky fire, while a million refugees flee their homeland. 

                               There really is no going back. 

Checkmate. Crimes against humanity. Rust and iron curtains.

                                             The colors of the Ukrainian flag 

are emblazoned on every bridge & every public building 

the world over, as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity, 

dusting off the dulcet words of democracy & freedom for Ukraine.

Babushki offer bread and salt and sweet tea to the defecting soldiers

while Putin sends a bouquet of missiles to the city Kherson, COD.

A Russian soldier wrote to his mother, I am in the Ukraine, 

This is not an exercise, we have bombed all the cities. 

They are throwing themselves beneath our wheels,

they don’t want us here, Mama, this is so hard, 

                                              just moments before he was killed. 

As Lew Welch said, This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

The babushka hands young Russian soldiers handfuls of seeds, saying, 

Put these sunflower seeds in your pockets, please. 

You will lie down here with the seeds. 

               You came to my land. You are occupiers. 

                        Do you understand? You are enemies. 

                             Fucking pieces of shit.

This is the last place, there is nowhere else left to go.

They have already lain down their bodies & souls.

For the seeds of freedom are the only crop 

that will surely grow in black Ukrainian earth.

A vast army of sunflowers tracks the sun.

Slava Ukraini!

           2 March, 2022 From our CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence