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

PILGRIMAGE

—Collage from Mary Oliver poems, The Journey, and Wild Geese. 

In your despair, did you crawl on bended knee, 

seeking salvation in distant meadows?

Did you circle the sacred peak three times?

Meanwhile, the wild geese seek true north, 

calling out for their homeland in the sky. 

Sometimes we forget that the journey 

is both the answer—and the question. 

As I mend the ends of my life, stiff fingers 

seek the melancholy dreams of leaves 

among the detritus of fallen branches. 

While the stars burn, supernovas waken, 

saving more lives other than just mine. 

There is no one way to tell a story.

The power of the word made real.

Listen to the wild geese stitching the lake

with their wings. It is a quilt to keep us safe. 

No matter which way the wind blows,

the path leads ever onward,

it knots the lake into a gossamer shawl 

made of twilight and the lost skeins of sunset 

while the geese circle, and settle in, 

to converse about the day’s progress.

8/23, Writing through trauma workshop with Carolyn Holbrook. Soul Bone Literary Festival, MIU, Zoom event

Writing through trauma with Carolyn Holbrook

           Poet, mend thyself —Carolyn Holbrook

I find myself missing John Oliver Simon more and more these days. I find myself saving up things to tell him though he’s been gone nearly 5 years, since before Covid. It makes me realize anew the importance of living life fully and in the present tense. It’s pointless saving up for a rainy day. 1. Because we are in a prolonged mega drought. And 2. But the drought of the soul is a desert indeed. It’s so easy to elevate someone to mythic status especially when they’re gone, said Joan Baez, a savior is a nuisance to live with at home. 

I recently extricated myself from an abusive relationship of 21 years. I don’t miss the poor attempts at gaslighting, but sometimes I miss the man. He was great fun at parties, the singer always at the center of attention, but that was also the problem. There was little room for me. And eventually it was easier just to fall into the pattern rather than buck the system. So I gave pieces of myself away. No one else to blame. I let it happen. But at least I had a room of my own and my writing sustained me.

Ironic, it was at John’s memorial, when I was asked to sing/read a poem I had written to John long ago, Horseflesh, with music composed by Jorge Luján, and I could see the jealous rage in Neil‘s eyes—perhaps because he felt I didn’t love him like that. And truth be known, he was right, I didn’t love him like that. Not anymore. He had squandered what little love we had long ago, with indifference. I was living in a vacuum.

Ironic too, in that my poem also triggered jealousy in John’s latest lover,  So much so, that a stranger came up to me to tell me how Susan hated me. The stranger said, watch your back. I decided to make friends with Susan, instead. I also couldn’t help but think that relationship was 40 years ago. There is no logic when it comes to range and jealousy. The heart feels what it feels.

My life is a river

I’m standing above the river. I am not of the river, but I identify with its raging torrent. I am mesmerized by the sheer power of the river as it tumbles down the gorge. It’s a real river, one of many I have met. This one is the Fraser River. A deep gorge. It stole my heart with its ferocious beauty and sheer power. Not like the Skeena River, with its broad glacial brush strokes that sweep across the land.

My life is a river, lost in the eddys and currents where fish rise to mouth the skin of the lake, taking the damselflies stitching the surface on late summer afternoons. I realize it’s been decades since I’ve swum in the river. Any river. Was a time when I spent summers in all the creeks and rivers of my childhood, my youth, and my younger life, as I shaped and honed my craft, the river ghost, and sacred water guided my way.

A river, a road branched that became a tree with spirits in the limbs, and birds. Eternity among the branches. Inconsolable suffering, an unredeemed sky drawn back to the land.

8/20/22 CPITS symposium

Navigating the 1960s in Marin County

It seems that I hold onto some things forever, like anger, and perceived slights. They blossom and fester in my garden of injuries, but sometimes they dissipate like fog. I do my best to understand that because I suspect that deep down, I assumed that my parents didn’t love me. Therefore, I cannot love myself. There must be something wrong with me for them to have abandoned me so.

Sure, my mother told me she loved me, and surely she did in her own fashion. Sometimes, if she had a car, she would whisk me off to the city where the urban and rural worlds collided.

Though, I was born in San Francisco, I was raised by my grandmother in the country. So it was all alien to me. I am grateful that my mother attempted to shield me while expanding my horizons even if I didn’t want expanding.

I remember one party were a man washed my feet in rosewater, it was so sensuous. I was about 15 but when he tried to lead me off, my carefree mother, turned into a tiger, the guardian of the gate, telling him I was underage, and it wasn’t going to happen. He dropped me like a hot potato which wounded my feelings.

I don’t think he realized she was my mother, we looked so alike in age, but it made me realize that, despite her myriad shortcomings as a parent , she did love me and cared about what happened to me.

I’ve gone way off strip script, but that’s OK too. I think we were at a party in Larkspur, at least that’s what it felt like at the time, somewhere similar under the redwoods. Maybe Mill Valley, she knew a lot of alternative folks as she embraced the counterculture as much as it embraced her.

She was an artist, an actor, costume, designer, and later also a writer, and I was newly formed. I was a teenager, negotiating the distance between an insulated life in the country with my grandmother, and the societal upheaval that was rocking the known world all around us.

I lived with a foot in two worlds, that of the country bumpkin, where my horse was central to my being, to this other edgy world, where everybody was redefining themselves in a society that was unraveling at the end to edges, like a black chrysanthemum exploding from the center.

My mother did not open that world for me. I was already exploring it. This is how we cut school and wound up at People’s Park, and Sather Gate to see Abby Hoffman, not to mention the peace marches where we marched against the war in Vietnam and the atrocities of the war machine that encompassed our lives.

CPITS annual zoom symposium

Asia Moore is speaking on the power of perspective, it is ironic. I am annoyed by our guest speakers who clearly have not done their homework, and decide to tell us what they think we need to know without knowing who their audience is. They don’t realize that we are fully fledged poets in our own right, contributing to the state and national poet laureates of America. But I can’t share that thought in the Zoom chat because it’s disabled. So I will take the easy way out and not participate at all. Abdication too is a tool.

She plays hip-hop, edgy music as we freewrite which totally derailed me. Moving me right out of the piece and the moment. I can’t completely shut off the sound. Students may like to write to music to make it different. But I don’t. OK I get that totally, but I am disappointed that we didn’t have a choice and we had to listen to the awful music. How can I possibly pick up from where I left off? Now I am in time present and no longer in the moment. Where is my river? Where has it gone to.

8/20 CPITS, annual symposium, Asia Moore

The color of fog

Having lived my young life in a dark fog, call it a ground fog —it was a way to escape the adults who became erratic as the ravages of alcoholism, that dark fog began to descend upon that 50s vision of suburbia. The worlds never meshed, the optimism and conformity gave way to the turbulent 60s. I was far too young to be a counted among the movers and the shakers, but my mother delved into the darkness of the drug culture. For or a moment optimism shone, the city of hope in a bowl of light, we didn’t see beyond the edges of civilization, thinking it was the center of the universe. But as the darkness descended, all those hippies and some of our own folks began to die in doorways or in barrels from overdoses and drug deals gone wrong. The color of fog changed into despair. I watched so many people lost in that fog. Mine was a protective fog, insulation me against what was happening around me. That same fog protected and insulated me from a world falling apart. I emerged unscathed and slowly I found my poetic voice as it began to emerge from the fugue of darkness.

8/20 CPITS Symposium with Luis Rodriguez

Open wounds of childhood

When I was a child I was busy saving myself, because the usual suspects were MIA, my parents having long since fled the scene of my upbringing for the seductive smoky darkness of Northbeach bars. My default parent, my grandmother wasn’t the sentimental type. If I did something stupid, she’d grumble under her breath, so I learned to hide my wounds. Like that time I broke my arm. But there were times when hiding open wounds was impossible. We were walking home from catechism class at St. Cecelia’s, savoring the sweet chewy splinters of a Big Hunk bar one overcast winter afternoon. We took the low road because it was safer than the highway. Not many cars on the road in those days, but there were fewer bullies. Burly Charlie Vollenweider and his lanky friend Chalmers Ingersoll, atop the cliff above the highway, waited for us: me, Kathy and Marie Nielsen, and the Nunes girl—little Catholic girls running the gauntlet. I was relieved the boys were stuck on the cliff. They jeered and lobbed rocks at us from the top of the cliff. We ran from the barrage of rocks. One hit my head with a crack that sounded like a baseball connecting with the bat. I screamed and ran down the road, sobbing, my knees buckling under my chin as I fought the road rising up to greet me, a wash of hot blood trickling from my head. When I got to Arroyo Road, to cross the highway, a driver appeared by chance, and slammed on the brakes. I remember a green Pontiac.Was it my aunt? A neighbor? A stranger? They drove me home. My wound was dressed by my grandmother, adept at triage, having raised four boys and as many tomboys. The sheriff was called, and of course, the Vollenweiders were summoned, and accused me of lying. The immigrant divide was playing out in our living room as Mr. Vollenweider raged on like a prosecuting attorney, you could see where Charlie got his bullying skills from. Charlie smirked at me. It was my word against his. I was a mere child, not yet ten. So, nothing ever came of it. Who would’ve believed a child? Three witnesses and an open wound weren’t proof enough. The doctor finally arrived from Pt. Reyes, with his little black bag in tow, diffused the tension, but I couldn’t stop shaking. The light he shined in my eyes was like a knife. They wouldn’t let me sleep, and the headache numbed my senses. In hindsight, Old Man Vollenweider was protecting his son. But whenever I brush my hair, the dent in my skull, and a small betrayal knot of scar tissue where that rock pierced my scalp, is a constant reminder of the battle scars and injustices of childhood that we all carry. That afternoon I learned that the bullies came in all sizes and they always win.

8/17 Write On! With Susie Terence

reading update

I read for two open mics, the first was at SF’s Bird & Beckett, on Monday the 12th with Kim Shuck and Molly Fisk, and the second was on Tuesday with Stella Bertalis for MoSt open mic (my 3rd reading with them. Gary Thomas and Ian Miller were featured readers. Slowly, I am rebuilding my poetic community via Zoom. I read my recent trees and fog poem both times. Before that, I stumbled upon the Soul Bone literary festival in Iowa, via Molly Fisk’s reading where I read at open mic, and took many of the classes as well. I actually like the ability to go to a poetry event via zoom. They are becoming less and less frequent as people begin to gather together, but I am liking the long distance relationship. And surprisingly, I have stayed active during this time of sequestration via zoom. I’ve gotten a lot of new writing orders. It’s been very rewarding. When it comes to free writing workshops offered over the Internet, I am shameless. I find that it helps me to write in directions I have not expected to. So, whenever possible I try to notate my sources at the bottom of my poems and prose pieces whenever possible. 

My last memory of Robert Duncan

My last memory of Robert Duncan, when I was still new to poetry, we were all loitering on a street corner in North Beach after a reading, whose reading I don’t remember, probably himself, and there was Duncan standing by the lamppost, holding court, talking talking and we were all mesmerized. Paul Mariah, Robin Blazer. Who else? If only I had a photo, instead of memory. We couldn’t bear to leave that street corner. He had me at Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.  I was hooked. I was also an eavesdropper, newly arrived to poetry. The traffic light kept changing from green to red over and over again. Stop, go, stop, go, as twilight settled in and the stars appeared.

Dream Journal: making coffee for John

Last night I dreamed that I was at a rustic cabin retreat deep in the mountains, long shadows and minimal sunlight. We were a gathering of poets. Someone asked me to make coffee, and though I searched everywhere for a pot to boil water in, I found nothing suitable. I had seen one earlier, but I let it get away. And then I couldn’t find it again. I rummaged through dark cabinets. On the bottom shelf, there was an ornate plastic punch bowl with a metallic sheen, matching cups, and a variety of small vases, but nothing big enough for boiling water over a camp stove, or an old fireplace. John Oliver Simon, who had asked me for the coffee, said he would take me to a place where there were larger vessels. I thought it odd at the time because he had me ride piggyback, so I rode him like a horse and centaur as we traveled across creeks and meadows, traversing glorious mountain passes that took my breath away. The blue netting covering his face was like a mask, but it was slipping, so I straightened it for him, tenderly stroking the face of my old love. We never did find the pots. The journey was the goal. When I awoke, it was as if he were Charon and we were crossing the River Styx, but I had no coins by which to pay him. It was another visitation dream. And somehow it felt like an old debt had been repaid.

the last travel dream I had with John was right before his death: John Oliver Simon dream

A HOARDER OF SMALL THINGS

I am a hoarder of small things with plain stories to tell 

if you look closely enough. How that one lone yellow die, 

buried in the dirt—its lost mates, long gone—

still hankered for the darkness of the leather liar’s cup 

that tumped down on the mahogany bar like a fist

at Speck McAuliffe‘s Lagunitas Lodge. He rolled the dice.

The long mahogany bar was my runway, sticky as flypaper, 

where I could crawl and observe the adults up close. 

My aunts, thirsty after picking berries in the creek,

amid sizzling crickets and relentless summer heat, 

nursed tall Tom Collinses garnished with lime, while I

was thinking of the pies that my grandmother would make.

And Old Pete, the last real cowboy, a mule skinner,

perched on a stool at the end of the bar that no one dared use, 

rolled his cigarettes one-handed, and lived out back 

in a Slipstream, with his strawberry roan in a makeshift corral.

And Speck wiping down the bar with a threadbare rag,

told stories punctuated by a nasal Boston drone 

by way of the Mission, like a politician or petty king.

Those ivory dice decided the transitory fate of so many, 

from who was going to buy the next round, calling out

from snake eyes to boxcars, was there enough time 

to knock back another one, or to leave the wife behind?

After all, it was midday. In the cavernous darkness of that bar, 

time itself was suspended. On leave. But no one ever turned 

down the politics of a free boilermaker or a whiskey neat.

I listened to their unfinished stories that bled like old wounds, 

ate the odd snack of stick matches or cigarette butts, seeds  

that even Pete’s mean old green parrot, rejected.

He swore like a sailor every time that liar’s cup hit the bar, 

and churlishly rejected my childish offerings,

no matter how carefully I tried to disguise them 

amid the hulls of sunflower seeds. His baleful yellow eyes

like small suns followed me as he edged closer 

to grab my finger, his black leathery tongue 

and cruel beak seeking revenge on all humankind.

8/10 Write On! Susie Terence 

• See part 1, The collector

The collector

I collect photos of landscapes and paintings that move me, an inspiration bank for new art. I never know what will grease the wheel but I do know if I collect enough imagery, it fuels the tank and fills me with longing, or if I am lucky, an urge to create. I don’t know which photos I will use, or how it will come out. That isn’t the point. Captured beauty, whether my own work or by the eyes of others, is still beauty.

Sometimes I gather chert and jasper red and green, abstract art embedded in lakes or creeks. Jewels glistening in sunlight and I feel rich when I add quartz and agates to the dragon’s wealth, in the layer of memory. Our small creek filled with treasures in the crimson roots of the alder caressing the water, so like blood, tiny dark seed cones like announcing Christmas in summer.

Sometimes I collect old coins and nameless iron gleaned from the garden, and admire the way that copper mimics the plants with their verdigris dreams. The rudder board of an old boat, brass screws. And my latest treasure, a big brass number six, part of someone’s address purloined from I know not where. The nail hole to mount it to a door or fence, both long gone, turned it into a swan’s eye and once I saw that bird I couldn’t let it go. It rides shotgun on my dashboard along with the river rocks and a brass cleat waiting for a jib line to tighten the sail.

8/10 Write On! Susie Terence

Lá Fhéile Lúghnasa Sona Daoibh go léir

Lá Fhéile Lúghnasa Sona Daoibh go léir. Lá fhéile' translates as 'feast day', 'lá' is 'day'. Sona translates to 'happy'. Sort of. And, 'daoibh' means 'to youse'. Singular is ‘duit.’ And ‘go léir’ is an extra everybody and y’all thrown in for good measure. The ‘go’ is a timeless oddity sometimes translated as may (you) as in may you all have a right grand time. And if you wanted to toss some extra blessings in you’d tack on Beannachtaí to the front end of that sentence.

“Peace to sky. Sky to earth. Earth under sky, strength in each, a cup full, full of honey, mead in plenty. —Cath Tánaiste Maige Tuired (2nd Battle of Moytura).

And as promised, the second installment of Lúghnasadh. 

Lúnasa, the beginning of harvest season, technically begins Aug 7 because our modern calendar doesn’t quite jive or jibe if you prefer, with cross-quarter celebrations juxtaposed halfway  between the solstice and equinox. 

Lúghnasadh is one of four agrarian festivals, once called Brón Trogain (the earth’s sorrow), followed by Samhain, Imbolc and Beltane. The Welsh equivalent of Lúghnasadh is Gŵyl Awst, in Breton, Gouel Eost (August festival), and the English equivalent is Lammastide (I mentioned that last week). 

The beginning of the harvest season is called Lúnasa in modern Irish (also the name for August—no Caesar here!), Lùnastal, in Scots Gaelic, and: Luanistyn in Manx/Vannin. But it’s the same bringing in the sheaves party however it’s spelled.

Dedicated to the god Lugh Lámhfhada, Lugh of the Long Arm—master of all the arts, this end of summer celebration marks the beginning of harvest season, also referred to as Lammastide, and to the Tailteann Games. Lúghnasadh ( -násad means an assembly) was a time of visiting holy wells, with lots of feasting, fighting, and fu- I mean, matchmaking, and horse and cattle trading. Possibly some raiding too.

The earliest written reference recording the Games and festivities is during the 15th c. in the redaction of Tochmarc Emire ("the Wooing of Emer"). Writing came rather late to Ireland, a country steeped in oral tradition since time immemorial, during the early Medieval era—there was a lot of catching up to do to record and preserve the distant past. First came the threat of the Vikings to annihilate Irish culture, followed by the larcenous British Monarchy. My grandmother said, Sinn Féin: Ourselves, Alone. Or, We, Together are saving culture story by story, no matter how imperfectly told.

The shape of the universe

Long ago, when I was struggling to grasp a concept of how the universe was shaped, I was thinking along the lines of the time-space continuum, gawd only knows why, how the past and the present could coexist at the same time. Using Kekule’s concept of problem-solving via dreams,  I dreamt that the universe was vast grid system by way an explanation, or perhaps it was merely a metaphor. But in the dream the lines didn’t run parallel or horizontal, no flat universe grids (that model is only for cats, those gravity-masters), the grid lines bent up at the edges, the way a straw looks like it’s in two places at once in a glass of water, and then it became circular, or bent. Sort of like being inside a Möbius strip. A warped universe. So I spent the morning making Möbius strip timelines with beginning, middle, and end. That model accounted for the past and present, but not the future. Epic model fail. The universe is roundish or sphering with a twist. Or two. Maybe even a Gordian knot. And we’re trapped on the inside, like mitochondria. The gravity of this situation is flawed. Not to mention the timeline. The origins of the universe is/was a singularity of infinite mass turning itself inside out, becoming a multiverse. Everything to-ing and fro-ing while expanding and contracting  at the same time.

DIGGING

As I excavated an old flower bed 

covered with years debris and duff,

the tump and pitch of the shovel changed songs

as I delved deeper into rocks and loam. 

Green chert and jasper emerged, obsidian flakes.

I dug past the debris, old paint rollers, beer cans,

shredded plastic, onto an age of opalized bottles.

Then, deeper into the dark jumbled ivy roots,

an artifact from my halcyon days at College of Marin.

My sculpture of Fat Kate on her throne,

emerged from tangled slumber, a relic of the past, 

when love was young & all things were possible.

Then, a Greek kylix, a jughandled goblet 

glazed with cobalt and rutile, a wine-dark ocean

streaked with sea foam and silvered feathers, 

oxidized iron green swaths across a borate bowl. 

Thano always told us to destroy our flawed darlings.

But we were young and thought we knew better.

The coarse clay that we mixed in the pugmill 

was gritted with pulverized pots, our failures, 

recycled to give strength and courage to new pots. 

What survived were not the masterpieces, 

but those failed vessels, the rejects we threw back.

The handle and spout held onto the flawed teapot, 

50 years underground. Hardpan packed into the belly 

insulated against the atrocities of weather and ice. 

It was like an archaeological dig excavating the past 

as I dug deeper, uncovering treasure after treasure, 

raku pots shards that once glistened in metallic hues, 

now mottled with age from the acid soil that leached 

bright copper carapaces into celadon streaks.

Only an oxblood pinchpot held its rubied stance 

against the rough markers of time.

I dug down deeper until I found the old coins, 

quarters and pennies from 1929 and 1937. 

Terminus post quem. Until I could go no further.

When our family moved here to this land, 

how much was a penny worth then, 

and what were their dreams made of?

8/3 Write On! Terri Glass

Lammastide and Lúnasa

Image: “Lammastide,” British postage stamp, 1981.

Lúnasa, the beginning of harvest season, technically begins Aug 7 because our modern calendar doesn’t quite fit with the cross-quarter day celebrations between the solstice and equinox. Dedicated to the god Lugh Lámhfhada, this harvest celebration and Tailteann Games, marks the beginning of the harvest season, also celebrated as Lammastide in Britain and Northern Ireland. I’ll give Lugh his due on Aug 7.

Today, Lammas Day, aka Loaf Mass Day, from Hlaef-masse, is celebrated Aug 1. The hlafsenunga, 'blessing of bread,' from segnian, is 'to make the sign of the cross.’ The Auld Lammas Fair, a traditional fair dating back to the Renaissance, is held in Ballycastle, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, every year on the last Monday and Tuesday of August. There is also a Welsh variant, Gŵyl Awst that ties in with Lammas Day rituals. 

In a book of Anglo-Saxon charms (no, not Bede who was strangely silent on the subject), Anglo Saxon monks blessed the first loaf of the new harvest, the Lammas bread, decorated and baked in the shape of a sheave, an owl, or a corn dolly, broken into four farls, and tucked in the corners of the barn to protect the new harvest from vermin and harm. 

Corn dollies were made with the last sheaf of grain so that the spirit of the corn had a place to winter over until they were turfed into the ground during the first plow. (Corn means grain, not maize.) The time of the agrarian goddess and the Greenman, a time of blessing of the First Fruits of harvest. 

The Old English name for autumn is hærfest. A sheep was let loose in the stubble fields and whoever caught it got to keep it. It was also rent day. In many parts of England, tenants brought sheaves of freshly harvested wheat to their landlords on the first day of August. The landlords in turn, gave their tenants a gift of a pair of gloves at Lammastide to show their authority and benevolence. 

A day that debts were settled, labourers hired, households moved, contracts and promises made. And from that, arises the term, “latter Lammas,” a day that will never come. And of course, there is John Barleycorn, who must die.