SALTIRE SKY (3 haiku)

Yesterday’s sky stretched

over taut coastal ridges 

was a vast saltire. 

Against a saltire sky, 

dusk flagged the coastal hills

with a catch of the day.

Mackerel skies 

crisscrossed with saltire jet streams

and billowing hills.

11/30

SPRECHGESANG

In my dead mother‘s purse, amid matchbooks,

roaches and cigarette butts, needles and pills,

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

What she was listening to, what transported her

when the drugs no longer numbed the pain.

I fixed the tape and slipped it into the tapedeck.

His voice, a gift, having betrayed him early on

from far too many cigarettes, his song having gone 

gravelly in his prime, and yet here he was, 

talk-singing his way through a new body of work 

as he massaged his voice back into the game, 

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

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

to be warmed by the bonfire, and the resurrection 

of Leonard sprechgesanging his way through 

the chorus of Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah 

all the way to the end of time.

1/30 Terri Glass Write On!

A NOTE TO CÚ CHULAINN

Oh, Hound of Cullen, 

I always wanted to ask you,

who did your hair? I mean 

with all those electrified locks 

standing upright like needles in rainbow hues,

capable of striking your enemies dead,

would be tricky to lime into dreadlocks.

And your superhuman strength—beyond imagining, 

with your seven fingers on each hand,

and seven toes on each foot, 

did they need special shoes, pampooties,

and which little piggies went to market? 

And what about those seven-pupiled eyes 

that could see beyond the curtain of time, 

unshielded by the glamor of Ray Bans,

did they help you to win your battles? 

What was the fabric of your dreams made of?

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

Sétanta, may I call you by your given name,

instead of your battlefield handle, Cú Chulainn, 

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

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

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

And you with your gáe bolga, a superpower weapon

unleashed against the backdrop of the Bronze Age, 

reimagined by monks during the Middle Ages, 

would wait another millennium before it was made real, 

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

But you broke your geis, because you could not refuse 

the hospitality of the hag, offering you the taboo 

of roasted dog, eating your namesake, 

or refuse hospitality, the cursed twofold dilemma, 

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

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

shining from your brow, and you came undone, 

your superpowers bleeding back into the earth.

And to think of how you exploded onto the scene, 

upholding the honor of the world as you knew it, 

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

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

the Mórrighan and her scaldcrows on the battlefield,

waiting to pluck out those marvelous eyes,

while we hid beneath our school desks, 

with our arms shielding our eyes, protecting 

our slender necks from the unholy light,

waiting for the bomb to drop. No magic cloak 

of forgetfulness to hide our fear.

11/23/22 Write On! Terri Glass

The doe’s breakfast

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

Aurora borealis in blue

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

THE WHEEL

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

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

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

Don’t fall too easily in love with the seasons 

because they evolve into the next season 

and soon the years will stack up like dominoes 

and at the end of your life, the domino effect 

will take on a whole new level of meaning. 

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

because the future is always madly dancing 

on the edge of the sand dune, taunting you 

with the corpses of old promises and regrets. 

You know, those things you always meant to do, 

Those lovers whom you always meant to meet,

those places where you always meant to go, 

but you never had the urge or the inclination, 

and now that you have the time, 

if you can catch it that is, for it too 

is dancing madly on the edge of night, 

always hovering out of sight. 

Only in dreams can you grasp it, 

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

until you wake up and it fades 

into oblivion like some distant mirage 

taunting you on the horizon of regret.

11/16/22 Write On! Terri Glass

NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS

A busy moth led me to a night-blooming cereus 

lit by moonlight behind a low lava wall.

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

blooms but once a year, and dies at dawn.

I leaned in to taste the intoxicating odor,

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

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

and wore it in my hair the next morning, 

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

We watched the black sun become a vast flower 

surrounded by stars and solar winds as the birds 

and fishes slept in during that second false dawn.

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

to dream among the honu turtles and seastars.

11/11/22

HOMECOMING

No one wants to witness a broken world, 

they want to recuse themselves. Call it an act 

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

The “not me “generation is an army 

of Jedi masters adept at deflecting blame. 

Not me, they say, not my problem,

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

Imagine that dead tree hovering over the roofline, 

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

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

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

It let go of my hand in the dark. 

Or the rising river after the storm, 

nibbling away at the ancient shoreline 

as the old house threw off its moorings 

to set sail for the open mouth of the sea. 

The sea whispered, not me, not me,

as a sneaker wave swept over the fishing boat 

too far from safe harbor to be saved. 

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

where everything winds up at the bottom. 

RED SKY AT NIGHT

Mount Barnabe lookout tower

built like the cabin of a small trawler 

schooling for fish among the clouds.

11/4/22?