Supreme Court folly

I was a love child. I have lived my life owned by no man, always my body, my terms. The men of my life knew better than that, and if they didn’t that that was the end. I was an accidental child, a mad scramble at sunset in the backseat of a Ford atop Bolinas Ridge overlooking the lagoon. The ocean is my mother, the bay, an artifact of the San Andreas Fault, the natal waters from which all life comes. The amniotic fluid of  byrazoan and seasponge, laminaría, coralina and copepod. I am not someone’s chattel. Perhaps this is why I never married, though I had offers enough.  And my body offered the fruits of its womb, a fecund harvest, before I said no three times, before my body listened. The genetic code is strong and the urgent blueprint to codify ourselves unto the next generation. I said no. I have never had to codify my choices. My body, myself. I was a child of the Roe vs. Wade era. I was also the product of an accident in the backseat of a car at sunset. My mother did not survive the onslaught of 50s that demanded broodmare wives. After the third baby by yet another man, a miscarriage of justice began during a time of coat hanger abortions. She said she wanted every one of her children, but her body was not able to collect rent when it was due. Then her mind. She aborted fetuses that could not survive the onslaught of the times.

6/29 Write On! with Sue Terence

Alexander McCall Smith’s inlet, Argyle

Billy Collins often asks us to write about what we’re doing and to post it on his poetry broadcast thread. This morning, I woke up thinking I was in Oban, of all places, I haven’t been there in years! and so I did a quick sketch of Alexander McCall Smith’s inlet near Argyle from a video he had posted, with friends singing an alfresco Jubilate Deo in the gloaming. My good drawing pencils and watercolor set were in the car, far away, but I happened to have nearby, an odd jumble of prismacolor pencils in a baggie I was planning to give away. I was desperately trying to finish a complicated multi-year Cal Arts Council Artists in Schools grant due at midnight, my head was a slaughtered pumpkin, I was working off the arse-end of a four-day migraine, and was flummoxed by the Covid/community access questions, and this wee drawing was my one lone procrastination distraction that I allowed myself. I tucked in, and got the blasted grant in on time. An odd solstice gift. Sometimes you just have to find the time to waste a little time. And sometimes the best art supplies (or camera) are the ones you have on hand. And yes, I did post it on Sandy’s Facebook page. No comment was the loud reply.

Black Bart, a life of crime

Imagine a self-styled Robin Hood intent on leveling the playing field between bankers and everyman, by robbing stagecoaches from Wells Fargo. See, Wells Fargo did him wrong, they screwed him over a lame land deal, they robbed him blind, and no, he never forgave them. Whenever there was a shipment of gold, he arrived on foot, unannounced, wearing the dust coat of a clerk, and a flour sack over his head. He was a gentleman poet, he never relieved the passengers of their trinkets and keepsakes. Only Wells Fargo. He offered up a poem, a posy, and a white handkerchief which he left at the scene of each crime. But Wells Fargo never surrendered. For years he harassed and robbed the stages, always on foot, having walked across California more times than he could count—to carry out his revenge. He was undone by a laundry mark on a handkerchief. No use crying over spilt milk. He was done with his life of crime, and poetry as well.

6/22/22

• Black Bart Rides Again
• Black Bart, Gentleman Poet

WHAT IF THE DEAD

What if the dead, 

not just family and friends, 

could visit us? 

What if we’re their mouthpieces, 

reliving interrupted dreams, 

imagining them as our own? 

What if those we admire 

have unfinished business, 

and stories to tell, and so 

they steer us closer to the heart,

so that we, the living, 

can bring closure to the dead? 

Picture Harriet Tubman, 

her head in a vise, dreaming 

of the open road, dreaming 

of following the stars north 

towards the heart of winter, 

the adamantine stars weeping. 

And what if we sing coded songs, 

having forgotten what they stood for, 

the drinking gourd corked with a star. 

Sometimes I imagine the dead 

slumbering beside me, 

with such stories to tell, 

that I wake up, forgetting all the words,

each fragment crenulating itself 

into fanciful constellations 

and when I wake up, all I remember 

is a scrabbled handful of stars 

thrown against the horizon of sleep.

6/22 Write On! Susie Terence

Greengrocer

Mr. Bagley returned home with a truckload of unsold vegetables. He drove a dusty-blue pickup the color of a humid sky, kitted up with produce bins and green doors that propped up to make a canopy. He must’ve had a greengrocer route similar to the Lucas Valley milk route in central Marin, over the hill, because we never saw him set up anywhere in the San Geronimo Valley. He was fairly new to the area, his large family took up two pews in the Lagunitas church. I didn’t know anything about them or where they came from. It was an unlikely convergence of events that became a moment etched in time. I was playing with Rosemary and Danny Magnussen. Taciturn Mr. Bagley didn’t say much as he counted out the day’s profits, a mere bowl of change. But his wife took it all in stride and cooked up a massive pot of rice and leftover vegetables. I remember sitting at a makeshift table on a large bulldozed flat, two old wooden doors on sawhorses turned into a table. It never occurred to the Bagleys to send us home. We were all invited to the meager feast, grubby neighborhood kids, no one was excluded. After a hard afternoon of playing kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek, yelling out olly-olly-oxen-free, come out, come out wherever you are, we were scabby wains as ravenous as vultures. I remember a mob of kids sitting around that makeshift table, seated on long planks or on tree stumps, scarfing down mountains of rice and butter, with zucchini and ketchup, like it was the last supper. I never tasted anything so good before. There was something holy and profound in that moment. It could’ve been a Dorothea Lang photograph straight out of a migrant worker camp. Mr. Bagley, sunburned and worn out from a long day selling his vegetables, gazed at us with watery eyes, then cracked open a beer, took a long drought from the amber bottle, then leaned back to take it all in as he smoked his cigarette down to the nub. In retrospect, they were probably on welfare, like many of us, the 50-pound sack of rice, from a food bank. Sometime those who had the least were the most generous. They didn’t stay long in the valley, they moved on to other pastures. Hopefully they were greener ones. What I remember is the indigo sky and the watery stars. And then, the long walk back home in the dark.

This evolved from a Facebook comment.

Buckeyes as famine food

Somebody in Trinity County insisted that native peoples routinely ate buckeyes. I countered and said that buckeyes were a famine food because the toxins were difficult to remove. What concerned me was that someone would read his comment as verbatim. And you can die from eating buckeyes. Sort of like eating oleander and there is no antidote.

He did not like my response and then proceeded to berate and harass me. When that happens, I copy my comments and then delete the thread from Facebook rather than feed his angst. Since he was responding to my comments, I deleted all his comments too. Score.

From a Facebook post. 

Buckeyes are a last-resort famine food, acorns are much easier to process, have more protein and are far less toxic. The only thing you need to leach out of acorns are the tannins—which is an acid, like in black tea. And they are highly nutritious. Hardest part is peeling them for leaching.

Double leaching won’t remove all the buckeye toxins. All parts of the buckeye are highly toxic, they contain the glycoside aesculin, a blood thinner, a saponin aescin, and more alkaloids. Not a mere case of getting rid of tannins. The glucoside aesculin is a toxic compound similar to glucocides in rat poisons. Most cases of aesculin poisoning occur when people roast and eat the nuts.

Aesculin poisoning symptoms include dilated pupils, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle weakness, paralysis, stupor and causes death to ruminants like cattle, sheep, horses, deer and humans. Only squirrels can survive eating them. Buckeye nectar is so toxic it kills non-native honeybees, “buckeyed bees” are deformed larvae. Luckily the nectar does not kill native pollinators. I don’t know if the pollen too is toxic, my guess is probably yes.

According to the Pomo elders I knew, buckeye required a lot of processiing to get rid of the toxins and was only used as a last resort if the acorns failed. And they’re also way less nutritious because you have to leech them so many times (up to ten baths). It could be that freezing and leaching removes some of the toxins but buckeyes raw are not good for any mammals. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

edited for clarity

On lynx and bobcats

Native lynx are being re-introduced to Ireland, to control a burgeoning non-native deer population that is hybridizing with native deer and stripping the forest. According to the Irish tTimes, people completely lost their minds. You’d think someone was suggesting that they were planning to let loose African lions to hunt in the suburbs of Dublin at night. We had a similar hysterical reaction in North America when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone.

So these are some of my comments culled from a Facebook thread

Most of the fear-based comments in this thread are absurd. Lynx are not lions. And if they became extinct around 1,300 years ago, then humans were the culprit. The medieval era was all about hunting and killing everything off. 

According to Irish mythology, there were indeed larger native cats. The Voyage of Maelduin. Place names: Owenynagat. There was the cait sith, Cairbe Cinn-Chait, Old Cathead, the usurper. In Scotland, Cloch taghairm nan Cat, the myriad Clach a'Chath stones (probably from cath vs. cat); then there’s Clan Chattan. The wildcats were later associated with witchcraft, or against Christianity—and that ultimately led to their demise.

We have a type of lynx in rural California, the bobcat, a descendent of the Eurasian lynx, and though they occasionally get lucky and make off with a chicken, we rarely, if ever, see them. They don’t make off with lambs or calves, or attack children. They are shy, solitary nocturnal creatures, they don’t hunt in packs like wolves. We never see them. And they don’t seem to tangle with foxes who are much more destructive when it comes to livestock.

In fact, I see more foxes than bobcats who rarely leave the protection of the forest. Their range is the entire North American continent. No one loses livestock or children to rufous lynx, or to its cousin, the mountain, or Canada lynx. Lynx are not very large, about double the size of a housecat. Or a little larger than the Scottish wildcat. They weigh 40-60 lbs, and stand under two feet tall, they’re the size of a small sheepdog. 

A Sitka deer may be too big for a lynx to bring down. They are literally twice the size of a lynx, and outweigh them as well. We had two species of non-native deer (fallow, and axis) that were eradicated by hunters in Point Reyes National Seashore. So it is possible to hunt them down. 

Some bad news, the Sitka deer have hybridized with native red deer in the Scottish Highlands, a death sentence to the red deer gene pool. Sterilization/birth control will quell, but not eradicate the Sitka deer. Sometimes it is difficult but necessary to restore the balance of mother nature. Or all will be lost.

Marie Walsh

My grandmother‘s niece, Marie Walsh, who grew up at Home Ranch, in the Reese River Valley, a block fault valley near Austin, Nevada, was a math whiz. But she disappeared right out of high school. Whenever my grandmother talked about her, she grew sad, Marie had disappeared. She said Marie was like so like an angel with her golden hair about her, my grandmother explained, task-tisking. My grandmother, who was also her godmother, was distraught by the lack of contact. Eventually postcards with 4-cent stamps began to trickle in from exotic places like Chicago, New Mexico, with no return address. Sometimes there were words cut out of the text going right through the postcards like little windows to the soul, but we couldn't see our way in or out. In this way we kept track of Marie, never knowing the backstory, or where she was. This much we knew, she was gifted in math. It had something to do with crunching numbers. Most of our family never got the math gene but we made up for it with boisterous singing at family parties, and in the gift of the gab. It was during the late 50s or mid 60s that we got the obituary, a small column scalloped by a fingernail scissors. My grandmother kept all Marie's cards and letters in an old cigar box, on the top dresser drawer that doubled as a linen closet. The article said that she had died of cancer and there was a hint of the life she had lead, hidden in the lines. I memorized the names of places, Alamogordo, White Sands, Los Alamos. In this way I learned the reason why we practiced those bomb drills, hiding under our desks, waiting for the big one to drop. During recess we all filed out onto the blacktop to see the white flash in the east, followed by the percussion and the sound as they detonated bombs at Jackass Flats. A neighbor, Roger Kent said the Manhattan Project was one of the best kept secrets during the Cold Was, as even his brother Buffalo, who was in the CIA, didn’t even know about it.

6/16 Mill Valley Library Non-fiction class with Sarah Broderick

IN THE COUNTRY OF POETS

In the country of poets, there’s a potter’s field 

limed with the corpses of dead poets, 

but the trains run on time. There are trees laden with fruit 

and horses prancing in a fancy parade, 

while a president is perpetually shaking hands. 

But in all those green pastures, the republic of poetry lies fallow, 

because in reality, no one ever adopts the poets. 

The unaknowledged legistators of the world have fled 

to safer climes as they are often first on the hitlist 

with a one-way ticket to that undiscovered country. 

This is an elegy for the dead poets of Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq. 

Now, Ukraine. The idea of a republic is an old notion 

bandied about until it slithers back into the black hole 

of despotic dictatorship. Again. You’d think 

we would’ve learned history’s harsh lesson by now.

From the toga republic of ancient Rome 

to the fascista black shirt of Il Duce, 

to the jumpsuited Orange One, the fight continues. 

I think of Ukraine holding fast to its identity 

as the new & improved USSR 

tries to swallow it like a despotic python. 

Mother Russia was always insatiable, 

unable to assuage her Stalinesque bloodlust, 

absorbing and stripping cultures 

at the speed of invading tanks, and missiles,

or cossacks rumbling across the tundra. 

How can I write about what was lost? 

And to think of our own republic of senators, 

in clandestine backroom deals, war profiteers 

selling out to the highest bidder. There goes democracy.

We, the people, are the ones that suffer, and so it goes. 

I admit I only watched the first day of the Jan 6 hearings. 

I can’t bear to witness any more, opting for synopsis, 

if only for a momentary peace of mind. 

Does that make me any less unpatriotic? 

I know this isn’t a poem, it will never be a poem. 

Yet I write because there is no hope of resurrection, 

nor will those plump images come to my bidding. 

It is nothing but imitation, after all. 

The labyrinth of music holding onto the past, 

is choosing you, whether or not you are ready for it. 

And hidden in the folds of the lair of dreams,

are things left undone that cannot be fixed, 

nightmares that resurrect at life’s end. 

In the trap of memory, what is in force, 

is not what I imagined, yet here we are. 

In the republic of the artists, the keepers of truth, 

we wouldn’t censor ourselves in order to beg for money, 

or tighten our proverbial belts, thus girding our loins, 

and not go down for the count. 

The realm of the heart is a labyrinth, 

with a policeman on patrol, searching for truants. 

And hope is a name looking for its heartsong, 

to escape on the wings of a bird. 

This is the first dead bird among many, 

feathered fragments of silence 

resurrected in the bookstore of dreams. 

That candle guttering in the library 

is a dangerous weapon of mass distraction.

6/15 Write On! Susie Terence workshop

IN THE KINGDOM OF WILDFLOWERS

IN THE KINGDOM OF WILDFLOWERS 

In the kingdom of wildflowers, clarkia and lupine,

iridescent dragonflies hitch onto stems like airships. 

I admired the way that blue dragonfly held onto the grass 

like a docking station in deep space 

and I suppose it could have been a she 

laying a constellation of eggs so far from water. 

Obviously she has hope for the future.

Her goal was the headlands of Walker Creek 

or the other fork, another dammed tributary 

in that nemesis of a watershed, where

that bend where the road nearly killed me. 

The bumblebees whirl and spin on the teasel,

each one circling a small white rosette of blossoms 

providing nectar and succor. The bumblebees nap.

In the garden I find a pipevine but not the pupae, 

shrouds of black swallowtails driven to near extinction.

Soon the sky will be filled with iridescent shadows 

and ghost thoughts in the air.

6/15/22

In one man’s republic

In one man’s country there is a potter’s field littered with poets, and the trains run on time. There are trees laden with fruit and horses prancing in a parade, while a president is perpetually shaking hands. But all those green pastures, the republic of poetry lies fallow, because in reality, no one ever adopts the poets. The unaknowledged legistators of the world, the keepers of truth, flee to safer borders. They are often first on the hitlist to that undiscovered country. The poets of Chile, of Iraq. Now, Ukraine. The idea of a republic is an old notion bandied about until it slithers back into the black hole of dictatorship. From the toga republic of ancient Rome to the black shirt of Il Duce, to the jumpsuit of the Orange One, the journey continues. I think of Ukraine holding fast to its identity as the new and improved USSR tries to swallow it like a despotic python. Mother Russia was always insatiable, unable to assuage its blood lust, absorbing and stripping cultures at the speed of tanks, or cossacks rumbling across the tundra. How can I write about what was lost? And to think of our own republic of senators, in clandestine backroom deals, war profiteers selling out to the highest bidder. There goes democracy. We, the people, are the ones that suffer, and so it goes. I admit I only watched the first day of the Jan 6 hearings. I can’t bear to witness any more, opting for synopsis, if only for peace of mind. Does that make me unpatriotic? I know this isn’t a poem, it will never be a poem. Yet I write because there is no hope of resurrection, nor will those plump images and juicy verbs come to my bidding. It is nothing but imitation. The labyrinth of music holding onto the past, is choosing you whether or not you are ready for it. And hidden in the folds of the lair of dreams, are things left undone that cannot be fixed, nightmares that resurrect at life’s end. In the trap of memory, what is in force, is not what I imagined, yet here we are. In the republic of the artist, we wouldn’t have to beg for money, or tighten our proverbial belts, thus girding our loins, and not go down for the count. The republic of the heart is a labyrinth, with a policeman on patrol, searching for truants. And hope is a name looking for its heartsong, to escape on the wings of a bird. This is the first dead bird among many, feathered fragments of silence resurrected in the bookstore of dreams. That candle guttering in the library is a dangerous weapon of mass distraction.

6/15 Write On! Susie Terence workshop

PIPEVINE SWALLOWTAIL

In the garden I find the elusive pipevine 

but not the pupae of the black swallowtail butterflies.

Soon the sky will be filled with iridescent shadows 

and ghost thoughts will drift unmoored in the air.

This is how we measure the beginning of extinction.

fragment 

see IN THE KINGDOM OF WILDFLOWERS

Endless summer

End of the school year. We were all sitting in the garage clubhouse on Railroad Avenue in Woodacre.  Someone was rolling doobies, an album cover served as a desk. Jimmy Bowman lit one up, inhaled deeply, errant seeds popping like firecrackers. He passed it around, and I remember looking at my friends, as if I was in suspended animation, present, but not fully present. You know that moment when you step outsite of your dailiness and take a fresh look. And everything looks strange and new at the same time. 

Judy Soga was mad for Jimmy and he was aloof which only spurred her on. We were a ragged tangle of odds and ends. Though I was a grade older, we were all roughly the same age as I began school early. There wasn’t anyone in the group I was romantically interested in except for maybe John but he was a summer blow-in, not a permanent resident. Besides, he was from LA which was hard to take. But he was my first kiss. I remember I didn’t like it. 

I wasn’t ready to grow up but I wanted to just get on with it. Rites of passags. Everyone else was paired up—even the twins, Jack and John McBride. John was seeing Janet who look like Yoko Ono. They crashed in Bill‘s white van on Dead Man’s curve. 

Bill, the drummer for the Sons of Champlin was our main man. We bought dope in little baggies laden with seeds for $15 a pop, pooling our resources. I contributed spare change when I could, but I wasn’t really into the dope scene. Seeds rolled off of the album onto the carpet as we rolled another one. Teach your children well was blaring on the dinky stereo, if you could call it that. 

There was something endless about that summer. The sheer depth of those blue skies and golden hills. The shadow green of oaks. We were all on the cusp of something—we knew not what, but something was stirring, and soon our tightknit group would disperse with the winds in the fall. We were growing up, and growing away from each other. I didn’t know to savor any of this. 

I was sitting at the piano bench with Jack showing me a chord progression. And in that moment, I realized that this happenstance friendship of proximity was every bit as valuable as the throes of first love. I thought of The Turtles singing, Happy together, and that was the last summer we were all truely happy together, before the winds came.

6/9 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

ODE TO A SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

Nestled in the Dollar Store bins, like broody hens, 

with cheery Easter egg covers, slender spiral notebooks 

that came all the way from China, begged for words in any language.

I was far from home, having forsaken notebook for computer long ago. 

I forgot how much I loved the tactile sound of felt pen against paper, 

purple ink carving out a highway of forgiveness on the pristine page. 

My first strokes were hesitant, wobbly as a child on their first bicycle.

It’s been decades since I kept a journal. I, who was almost religious—

aside from an occasional skirmish with random scraps in classrooms, 

or in the car while driving down the highway, small blank refuges

when nothing else would do. Those pages were broken wings,

orphaned thoughts hiding out in the most unlikely of piles. 

They were buried in that precarious horizontal storage system 

that threatens to engulf us all. But imagine my surprise 

as I culled old teaching files to find nascent poems hidden deep 

in manila folders, beneath old class lists and shards of student poems. 

It was like finding buried treasure off a sunken reef of the past

with an impossibly blue sky guarding it with blankets of golden sunset. 

Then, a night sky—was that the Southern Cross reflected on its surface?

Words waiting to combust off the pages into another life, unimagined.

6/9 Write On! with Terri Glass

What did you do today, Billy asks

What did you do today, Billy asks. He is collecting fragments of dailyness from each of us. We are juxtaposed list poems in the making. I tell him I compiled my end of year student evaluations—second through fifth grade—for a grant, if there is a next year.  I ate stale vegetable chips because there was nothing else left in the house. I am in desperate need of coffee, and now it’s too late in the afternoon. It’s hot and muggy after our freak summer rainstorm, we might as well be in Florida. The rooster is complaining. We never get rain in June. I take that back. We sometimes do get rain in June, it’s unusual and when it comes with lightning, then we have wildfires. Not to mention humidity with a threat of arsonists. This last storm did not disappoint. Last night, an eucalyptus grove in San Rafael caught fire. They are like blow torches when they ignite. And the homeless freelance arsonist was finally caught on camera so the Russian River watershed did not go up in smoke—though he tried 11 times. People got mad and decided to do something about it. They mounted wildlife cameras on all the redwoods throughout the Russian River gorge, from Monte Rio to Rio Nido—and they finally caught him on tape. Or rather, digital. He was clever, changing his clothes, so he wouldn’t be recognized at the scene of the crime. The camera caught him removing his orange shirt as he rode off on his bicycle.  Earlier in the month, another homeless arsonist set fire to the inside of the largest redwood in the North Bay, it fell during a windstorm. Why do they want to bring these giants down? Redwoods already hanging onto the brink of extinction. These days I find myself weeping for the trees. A venerable age of trees is lost.

DYING REDWOODS ON THE REDWOOD HIGHWAY

It was after the Tubbs fire that I first noticed it, 

the redwoods were dying – not just where the flames 

had leapt the highway to devour Kmart and TJ‘s. 

Those spindly blackened sticks 

re-sprouted greenery from their trunks. 

Regeneration after the fire was possible. 

After all, they were redwoods. 

So odd to see the furry green poles 

with blackened arms reaching for the sky.

The branches dead in the fire’s path.

But life returned, the cambian layer 

pumped precious sap skyward.

It reminded me of the lizards 

regrowing their tails from the heart. 

But not so for all the other trees 

lining the Redwood Highway. 

Sure, many trees were planted a half century ago or longer, 

but the water table has drastically dropped all over California. 

Some 30 feet in the central valley. 

We are losing elevation, we are losing height 

every time we pump water from the ground. 

In some places, sea level has been breached. 

In the Alexander Valley it began with the grapes. 

A neighbor’s well went saline. 

Remnants of ancient sea beds resurrected.

We trucked in water, used groundwater for dishes and laundry. 

Our own private odor of sulfur, radiolarian and Satan‘s breath.

Our skin was so slick and smooth, we were sleek seals 

cavorting in tubs. But now it extends throughout the county 

not just one county but the entire north coast.

The redwoods are dying, they are dying. 

They are dying. everywhere.

And we cannot turn the tide.