Seven Sisters

Flies pester the duckweed while the river converses with both shores at the same time. An ex-lover on the opposite bank, and the creek divides our past. A narrow tongue reaches to the bay where, as a child, I thought surely the gods must inhabit this place.

His eyes pester me like the river flies and midges and gadflies. A lizard does late-summer push-ups on a tree stump. Spring is over, lizard. No time to mate. But hope springs eternal.

First day of fall, the water holds the promise of the seasons. When John Oliver Simon vacates the opposite beach, I climb down to a rock in the river, bubbles and duckweed strike the submerged rock like migrating islands.

There was a time when I caught fish barehanded in these same tributaries. In the backwaters and eddies, bent light and dark oscillations fragment the surface. Stone pool and moss, miniature vortices, like lost conversations.

Below the rock, the crawdads wait for the dead. Water skeeters jet against the current, streaming bubbles of air. Migratory birds pester the alders for hidden seeds. Midges circle the palpable air, loose spiderwebs luff and stray.

Last night, we sat up late discussing the names of plants. The ridge, Wildcat Ridge, a watershed between my past, my childhood, and my present state. Cattails like young trees, guard the umbrella plants. I tell Arthur Dawson, they are related to papyrus. As we write.

Our eyes connect to where I come from and where I live. Scorpio and Sagittarius wheeling and rising in the sky. I relearn the names of stars under a full moon readying for the eclipse, September 26, the last eclipse of the century. Fin de sicle, how do we know where we're going with our art? Did the Impressionists and postimpressionist have foreknowledge?

Later, seven women will swim nude in the reservoir above the creek. And we will admire each other's bodies in the sunlight, breasts floating like lily pads, nipples beckoning. Someone says I want to suck them all. And this water within us is also part of the cycle. Who is peeing in the pond?

We are the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, who don't want to rush back to the daily grind, not yet. Ruth Gendler dries off. She is meeting a friend for Yom Kippur, but the water draws her back again in one last time. A baptism of sorts.

CPITS journal, Walker Creek

After the California Poets in the Schools conference, the letdown, the long, slow goodbyes, this is my family of poets. All of this wonderfully crazy. During the closing ceremony, of course, through the process of elimination, I was standing next to John Oliver Simon.

It was so strange to be holding his hand again after all these years. I'd forgotten how strong and warm they were, and that false sense of security they gave me. And I was uncomfortable with him around, but not majorly so. More like an awareness and a pattern of avoidance long-established.

Terri Marquis asked him if he was uncomfortable around me, and he answered, no, but he was aware of my discomfort, putting it all upon me. And taking his cue from that. She said, I couldn't help but think of you last night, up there, reading. You were so beautiful, and his eyes were all over you. He must've felt some regret.

Funny, the poem I chose to read was in the anthology, Poem for Sarah, had buckeye images in it,. Arthur read a new poem about the old man and buckeyes. This morning he commented upon it and said a lot of our poem are dialogs to others. He said he had heard me read that poem several times. Acknowledgment and the dialogue continuing beyond the poem.

Last night as Arthur and I were dancing, we were spiraling towards each other. I was relieved when Luis asked me to dance. We clowned around and danced absurd tangos, and deliberately fell flat on the floor at the end of the song like exhausted dancers. How wonderfully absurd, a flirtation and parody. People laughed and clapped.

Arthur and I danced some swing. We danced foursomes interacting with others or merely doing exercises. I don't think there's another group of people I'd rather dance with. There is a special comraderie in knowing everyone for 10 to 15 years, makes this an extraordinary group of people.

It was brave of Luis Kong to come to the conference. He had to leave behind the past, and several people had problems with his heavy-handedness when he was Executive Director. No way to heal, if you can't forgive. How can you forgive if you never faced? An extraordinary conference. We're not falling apart contrary to popular belief.

Luis shocked me by commenting about my dancing with Arthur, reminding me that  Arthur was a married man. I retorted, Why, does it look like it? I am not doing anything with Arthur. We are circumspect. Luis said, I'm just teasing. But he scored a bull's-eye on that one and he knew it.

Yes I will admit there is an incredible attraction, but I flirted more heavily with Luis who is also married man, because it was safe. I'm a wild flirtatious dancer.



Arthur and I hiked up the ridge
a 15-minute moonlight walk that lasted hours
I was bearing small bits of my soul to him
as we stood on the ridge overlooking the valleys
where harsh shadows conjoined in the canyons.
We alighted on the grass, watched the constellations
wheel across the sky, with the Arabic names of stars
etched on our tongues.

rev 12/17

need date 1996

CPITS student poetry reading, Barnes & Noble

Poetry reading with Bill Moyers, Sonoma

I spent the morning on PBS radio with three students, and Arthur Dawson had two students reading poetry. Then we practiced with students at Roseland, running off flyers, then dashing off to the Sonoma high school gymnasium to meet PBS investigative journalist and author, cultural icon, Bill Moyers.

Bill Moyers said many of us aspire to be poets and then he read a quote from Gary Snyder saying that the mind interprets the world in so many ways. Tonight we are paying honor to the handwork. Moyers says that poetry is a journey. When you get it right pass it on, said Snyder. 

Bill Moyers recounted that William Stafford said he writes a poem a day. So what if it's not good? I just lower my standards. We laugh. Jimmy Santiago Baca in El Gato, said he wrote a poem to the parole board to get out of jail. Bill had a question: what's poetry done for you? Jimmy Santiago Baca said, Poetry's kept me from being one of America's most wanted.

We re-created the July Readers' Books event for Bill Moyers, with Jane Hirschfield David Bromidge, Tom Centolella, Sam Keen, Arthur Dawson, myself, and our students reading poems, in tribute to Bill Moyers and his PBS series, The Language of Life. It was a tear-moving event.

Bill Moyers praised us, and California Poets in the Schools, what we do in essence, is the heart of poetry. CPITS was the central focus of tonight's events. I emceed the student reading: Little Matthew Merner, a second grader from Higham Family School read with such confidence, I thought I'd burst with pride. And it was a packed gymnasium, all the way to the rafters.

I closed the kids' poetry section with Trevor Yeats' poem, This Body is to Ask. The audience gasped in appreciation. I had tested the audience earlier by telling them that Trevor Yeats was the great-grand-nephew of William Butler Yeats and they all yelled Yeats! I said, OK, you guys passed. I finished the reading with my Poem for Sarah, which Bill Moyers said he liked very much, and asked for a copy of it so I gave him the kid book.

This body is to ask
this question of the mind:
Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?
Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?
Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?

Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?
This is the breath, to breathe this air.

Trevor Yeats
2nd grade,
Higham Family School
Santa Rosa, CA

I said that the poem was coming out in Voices Israel and, and he asked me to keep in touch. Later Judith, his wife said the next program they are working on is on healing and the mind, and they wanted to use poetry. Yvonne Lyerla told him how I had worked at Napa State Hospital. But I leapt ahead, nervous. 

At the end of my reading I said picking upon a line by young poet, Gabby, who was 10, had said about politics. I closed with: poetry is the ultimate political act. Which at the end, Bill Moyers quoted, building his closing speech around it. I was twice honored. A magical evening. 

We all went to a restaurant across from Murphy's pub where a guitarist was singing the Foggy Dew. My grandfather's favorite song. Earlier this morning I had read something that Bill Moyers had written in his book about folksongs as being poetry, and leading us to poetry. And I thought of how those Irish folk songs led me to poetry, and those circles were completing themselves tonight on several levels. Epiphany after epiphany.

CPITS reading, San Rafael

CPITS meeting at the Falkirk Center. We're reading at Open Secret in San Rafael, Steve Garber, Toby Kaplan, Arthur Dawson, and myself read to an audience of four in the temple room, a wild and wonderful room with Ganesh and Buddha, and hundreds of Tibetan singing bowls.

Steve's wife was there with their daughter and though he occasionally philanders through the ranks of CPITS poets, Toby says they remain committed to the relationship because of the child. 

I look at the little girl, she's beautiful and looks Irish, I say to Steve, We are mostly Irish, especially when we fight, said Steve. Funny, I resemble that. I could tell instantly that she was Irish. Why is it that we Irish can spot each other so easily? 

Of course, no one can tell that I'm Irish. I tease Susan Wooldridge about being Jewish when she, Steve and Tobey all look at each other. Susan saying to Tobey and Steve: I didn't know you were Jewish! We laugh. Their blue eyes dancing, I laugh, saying, Everyone thinks I'm Jewish, and I'm 100% Irish. Susan instructs me to turn around, and slaps my butt, and says, Yup you're Jewish. 

Thursday night I'm going over to Tobey's for Passover. Someone asks, how do you get invited? and the tradition of the CPITS poets Passover dinner is born.

Quantum poetics

Road weary, after a long weekend away from home, I slept until 9:30. I'm sure I was asleep by midnight, nine hours' sleep is atypical for me, a sign I'm truly tired, and I did not get enough sleep at the CPITS conference. I took a nap as we drove home, what funny dreams I had of Arthur Dawson, just now coming to life.

It was after the CPITS conference at Walker Creek Ranch that I first began to have prophetic dreams about him, which, to my consternation, came true as we walked up the path to the reservoir. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, telling me that this man will have a significant impact in my life. Pay attention.

I'm still trying to sort out what he is to me besides a CPITS poet that I've trained in the 1980s. We've known each other for ages, but it wasn't until three years ago that I let down my guard, and we began to know each other personally.

The problem with my attraction is that he encompasses all my male qualifications. But he is happily married to Jill, whom I also think is terrific. So I keep my distance, afraid something may begin, that shouldn't come to be.

I remember Ken Larsen saying he didn't think that Arthur was my type, when I confessef that I had a mad crush on him three years ago. And I think he meant Arthur wasn't as strong-willed as I am. Perhaps I'd walk all over him. I don't know I haven't seen that side of him, but he is constant and determined—like water at a steadfast pace.

He keeps a light hidden under that exterior and there is a lot more there than meets the eye. You have to look closely. He doesn't brag or do the all those male things to boost his ego, and is therefore much harder to read.

Anyway we went to Sanger together, sharing the driving, and we shared a cabin, as we had arrived around midnight in the rain. We didn't talk about rooming together, it was just understood. Nothing happened and we made no passes at each other, we just couldn't stop talking, and laughing all night long.

We spent a long time downloading the personal stories. So many of our stories were based on other stories to preface it. It got to the point that I had told him so many things I couldn't remember what I'd said before. So we devised a cue, to ward ward the other off, saying Cut if we'd already heard the story. And we mostly talked about our travel adventures, and funny incidents on. And we have been to so many of the same places: an obscure lake in Ecuador, or a remote Indian village in British Columbia etc.

At one point near Los Banos, I laughed so hard, I wet my pants. I did have a full bladder at the time, and the name of the town didn't help I'm sure. I had an attack of dyslexia, incorporating odd words. I can't remember how I arrived at Robert Floss for Robert Frost. We were talking of chance, deciding which road to take, John Oliver Simon and I used to flip an old coin at the crossroads, or at the X or Y roads. And the chromosomes too.

I got a card from John from Colombia. Arthur and I discussed the difficulty of finding good traveling companions, nothing like a third wheel. How he describes most people he's met on the road. And in two years, he's done a lot of road traveling with Jill. I miss traveling with John, it's what we did best together.

I think when Arthur and I both went through our mother's deaths, I had already gone through my father's, it forged a bond, a common experience. That opened us up to all our vulnerability. He and Jill invited me to a day of the dead celebration. I didn't go, in my collective grief, I withdrew. In my vulnerability I couldn't succor comfort there.

But hey I'm getting too serious here. What I want to write about are the funny incidental events from the weekend.

Saturday night we didn't party as we were very tired poets. We read poems and then drifted off to bed. Arthur and I decided to go hot tubbing, talking up a storm as usual. I felt uncomfortably fat, so I was hiding my body. Perhaps there was a sexual awareness growing between us. Arthur tended to keep a larger distance than when we were clothed.

Naked he is very beautiful with his curls, and his Davíd mouth, and I think of the Greek statues, and how the half-life of his skin takes on the quality of polished marble. I know that my breasts are beautiful in the gloaming. And the water is too hot so we perch on the rim and chatter on.

As we make ready to leave, a deluge of rain pours from the sky. Not standing on ceremony, I grab my clothes and streak across the back patio to the main cafeteria, buck-ass naked. He has a raincoat and dresses in the rain, wrapped in the towel. Organized. I watch him stop at the gate to retrieve something, he stares at it a minute, making me curious.

We stand underneath the eaves watching the sheets of water cascade from the sky. We could be in the tropics, it has that feel to it. It's like Tikal in the rain. He hands me my underwear, saying, You might want these. I'm embarrassed. I could have sworn he had a funny look on his face. Perhaps there is the temptation there after all. Perhaps I imagined it.

We navigate our way to our cabin and the road is underwater. We skirt the issue taking the high ground and head toward the lights shining warm in the velvety darkness, like moths to the incandescent glow of skin and cabin lights.

There's a settling in, and the acceptance of a bond between us, we never name nor define it. I talk of a piece I'm writing on quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, I explain that in by the naming of a relationship, we change what it is, or what it isn't. We meddle with the outcome. The dilemma of seeking clarity, versus the acceptance of what it is, screws us up every time.

In this way I discover his father was a physicist. Los Alamos. By this time I'd confessed just about everything about Mary Walsh and the Manhattan project and he thought his dad might be able to get me information on her. In this telling of relationships and quantum metaphor, I describe my prose poem, The Arc in the Dark of the Year, but I could also be talking about relationships existing in a parallel universe.The possibility or the existence of a deeper connection on another plane of reality.

He reads me a poem on physics, it's wonderful. I reach for my poem only to find he put my bag on a chair across the room. Since I'm naked under the covers, I don't want to get up or make a mad scramble for my nightgown. We'd already gone to bed once already, and turned off the light, only to get the urge to read more poems to each other.

He says want me to get it for you? Which is ridiculous, for it's on my side of the room, and he's in his underwear. He is a little too tongue-in-cheek teasing me over my false modesty based upon shame, because I think I'm too fat (I'm not).

We are already naming things and I didn't want that to happen, not with him. I preferred the ambiguity of potential. But by teasing me, I remember three years ago, at a CPITS conference, we were dancing so hard that runnels of sweat trickled down our bodies. I'd had a migraine all day and was dressed in sweats, not intending to dance. So I fashioned a sort of halter top from my sweatshirt, with sleeves tight across my back, and the body like a bib across my breasts.

We were dancing so hard, he was spinning me like a top, our arms sliding in and in and out of knotted formations, until we were a Gordian knot. He was spinning me until my sweatshirt threatened to take flight across the room, causing a stir of excitement in the room with the men loving the potential of dancing breasts.

I was Phaedra unveiling my charms, but then shame crept in, and I struggled to be modest, which only made him spin me even harder. Was I imagining a glint in his eye? The enigmatic man had more pique then I gave him credit for. Titillation?

Again, the fear of defining it comes to mind and thus changes the reality of it. I reneged on reading my poem, rather than have him cross the room nearly naked to bring my poems to me, naked in bed, and therefore opening up that door of possibility—for that was what brought into circle, the focus that we were naked together in a bedroom, the thin distance of twin beds and the potential of two people reaching out to touch each other like God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel that spark of inspiration. Subtext and context.

Me, the older and theoretically wiser one, at 43, he's 37, six years younger than me, trying not to notice his body. Surely he sees my eyes slide over his body as we lie in our separate beds facing each other.

Do I refuse to see that his eyes slide over me and that I try to remake the intention of his glances into something asexual. That I cleanse myself of impure thoughts as if I were both the cause and the problem, with only myself to blame? I caution myself, put unchaste thoughts out of my head. And turn out the light and think about sex to the tattoo of the married rain. Is this a one-way attraction? I want to be able to deliver him home to Jill touched, untasted which I do manage to do.

Does she worry about him? I think he is a faithful man but perhaps infidelity has never arisen though they've been married for years. I detect a small glimpse of her when she touches his knee as she retrieves the phone. I make my escape, hugging him on the porch, and driving home into the night, knowing that they will make mad passionate love within the hour while I'm still driving home, and it keeps me safe to drive home like that, in the darkness, in that final darkness.

On Saturday night I told him about the prophetic dreams I had of him three years ago and how they were coming true, there were several clues this weekend. Things I couldn't dream up. The clincher was when he handed me my underwear, it was as if the gods transpired against us to break our vows.

On the way home, we stop often Isleton for a platter of crawdads and beer collecting our own On the Road memories. The waitress mistaken us for lovers, neither of us bother to correct her. It is our secret. As if we couldn't ignore what continues to stare us in the face, to tempt us.

I have trouble keeping my thoughts pure, as if he could read them. I reveal my my Catholic self, the pagan self smoldering under that brassiere, or jockstrap of faith. She hands Arthur the check in saying he wins the prize for being the best looking man in the dining room, we're alone in the dining room, and I add, And at the bar too, for that matter. It just slipped out, I hope he did not hear it.

Because we are not used to each other, we are not always in sync, but we quickly adjust our rhythms to match. It's most noticeable when we sing, and already I know the danger of singing together, for Oleg and I once poured our souls into each other until passion took root and consumed us, forbidden in the face of marriage vows. Separated wife or not. To give into something greater than the self, or to observe the rules and customs of the potential world when in reality moral valves have little to do with sexual appetites.

Steve Garber who cannot resist the siren call, has been married for years. We stopped at the Kings River on Sunday morning. Veronica Cunningham, Steve, Arthur and I stop for for lunch and goodbyes at Piedra, a crossroads on the Kings River. Steve confessed that he's often been unfaithful to his wife, as if it were something out of his control, and perhaps it is. I don't want to know this.

Over the years, I have felt his eyes slide over me, and carry on, but I am not his type, and that shields me from his sexual indiscretions, but by rejecting his amorousness, I also avoid that coldness and distance that he is capable of, which frightens me.

I am somewhat flattered by his sliding eyes and certainly have done the same to him, but I am immune to his kind of man, for our minds haven't made love. That click hasn't happened, and I feel I have to slide up and down a theoretical dance pole searching for the right notch by which to communicate. I am shy of him, and that distance is a protection.

In his confession he becomes more vulnerable, and I like him more for it. Perhaps there is a foil of antagonism between us that this allows us to become closer. I value and appreciate him but I am also afraid of him, for if he were to pursue me, could I resist him? On any or any man that I am attracted to?

Then there is the notion of attraction, containable to a degree, the flirtation a booster adding a false piquancy to our interactions the old carrot tease at the end of the donkey stick.

It's not love, but it does make us glow from within, and brings us joy. Is that such a sin? Who'd have thought that I have would have so much trouble with the ninth commandment coveting another woman's man? I guess it's something as old as humankind, this coveting thing.

All my men belong to other women Jim, Trygve, Sean, so why not Arthur? Because I know Jill, and it seems they are have a happy marriage. The others are always in a state of limbo. Jim is on-again, off-again with Nancy, Trygve, the same thing, and Sean is separated. All of them are in flawed relationships. So it's easier to pretend all of this is merely in my head, putting the blame upon myself, rather than opening up to the potential.

Besides, I think if something were to work out between us, the mutual guilt over Jill would erode and destroy what little potential for happiness we might have had as a couple, for he is the kind of man I would really fall hard for. There would be no turning back.

Could I just have a little fling with him and be satisfied? It's possible, but the seduction is in the giving of everything, and holding nothing back. With the others. it's merely transitional; we're not talking of the kind of love that requires that you give up everything. So we practice denial, and call it friendship, and let it go, until something else comes along to strip the pretense away, leaving us naked after all.

added 11/17

Gundlach-Bundchu reading

A good turnout: 35+ people showed up for the Gundlach-Bundchu Dead Poets reading in the vineyard by the caves. I read William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow to appreciative chickens roosting on haybales. 

People commented that my reading of the dead poets was very dramatic. I made an impact, or they liked the way I read. A wonderful reader they said. Lila of Readers Books said I performed so well they were going to put me on the main stage tomorrow with Bill Moyers to help raise money for California Poets in the Schools. 

I'm a little miffed, don't they know that I'm the Area Coordinator for CPITS? I feel a bit betrayed by my CPITS protege, Arthur Dawson who should've made sure I was included in the festivities. So much for altruism and reciprocation. I feel like a ghostly apparition.

Apparently my fundraising strategy was so good on Wednesday night that I raised over $50 in nickels and dimes. They said I was such a good emcee, they would love to use me tomorrow, but they'd already asked someone else. Clearly, I have made an impact, too late. 

Thanks a lot, Arthur, for supporting me. Hopefully the networking will pay off next year. They asked me to come early to the reading to help set up. This is good because I keep getting a negative vibe form Luis Kong. He's keeping his distance as if his trouble with CPITS was my fault.

Arthur Dawson, his wife, Jill, and I went to Murphy's Pub for a pint. A surprise to see Don Coffin there playing Irish music. We sang along, and drank and ate ourselves silly. 

I was busy talking to Jill, when Don yelled out Maureen! I thought he was yelling at me for talking during his set. Turns out he wanted me to play the bodhran, only I don't know how to play it, only the spoons.

7/28/1995 

Gundlach-Bundchu Vineyards & Murphy's Pub

Sonoma

RRWG reading Maureen Hurley, Terry Ehret, Arthur Dawson, Johnny Otis Club