Sea Hunt, or learning to swim

Of course, I did not do the writing assignment. I was too much of a flibbertigibbet to settle into it. The problem always was that I never admired the celebrities. Somewhere along the way, I had learned avoidance. And so I avoided the writing assignment.

See, we had so many celebrities, mostly musicians, living the San Geronimo Valley with us that I became quickly soured, inured to fame, feeling invaded as they bought up houses, moved in and turned everything upside down with their newfound wealth. As Joan Baez said, a savior’s a nuisance to live with at home.

At an early age, I fell in love with the sea. Lloyd Bridges playing Mike Nelson was my hero, taking us down to the underwater realm in black-and-white, on a neighbor’s old television—when we could get reception, which was iffy. Usually it was electronic snow emanating from the Andromeda galaxy decorating our screens, and the hiss of deep space singing.

A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, The Bahamas, 1985. )photos)

The Bahamas, 1985 more photos posted as comments below each Facebook photo

A gathering of poets, Orange Hill, Nassau Island, The Bahamas, 1985. There are many more photos posted as comments below each main photo on Facebook (the link is public), which you may not see on a smartphone or tablet unless you actually click on comments. You might notice that a photo has three comments, that’s three more photos embedded in the comments.

I arrived in the archipelago of some 700 atolls and islands spread across 550 miles, a week early to help set up the conference. Dave Evans, founder of the Napa Valley Poetry Conference, was the brainchild and midwife of an exotic adventure into poetry. The cast of poets is pretty extraordinary too. With the underwriting of a famous novelist's wife, we managed to relocate the entire conference from the Napa wine country to the Bahamas. We drove to the tiny airport to welcome the poets. Nearly all the poets were from California, and a few from New York, to attend this first international Bahamas writers' conference.... —from Monster from the Deep

Sharon Doubiago, ? Kristine Lauritsen, ? Nathaniel Mackey, ? Robert Hass, Carolyn Forché, ? Marcella Taylor; Dave Evans,??? me.

I’m so tickled I was able to finally get a clean copy of the group shot. This is where going digital really pays off. I scan the negatives in color @ 3200ppi, to get wider range of greyscale, then reduce the saturation level so that there is only the greyscale band left, no RGB. That's what gives them depth. (The richness and depth of the background makes me all drooley. Also the crosslight on faces. Or the way the presence of light can create the framework for the photo. It's a Vermeer thing.)

The original photo was Tri-X 400 ASA, probably pushed to 800 ASA. I never could get a decent print of it. By digitalizing it, I was able to bring out the details. Something I never managed to do in the darkroom. Ilford glossy paper (vs. matt paper, which had a wider range of greyscale) gave the best overall results but much was lost in the stark contrast between black and white. Paper choice was always a juggling act.

Scanners don't do well with B&W negatives, part of the problem is that the silver bromide left on the film reflects back light to the lens. I'm using an Epson Perfection v550, which has a single lens. I really should use the Epson Perfection v850 scanner with its dual lens system. It handles the reflected light much better. I realize this is all Blah blah blah Ginger to most of you (WTF is she nattering on about?)

FAN l, FAN ll

FAN I

Three blades gather dust inside a silver cage

where, in summer, yellow yarn flutters 

like  suspended birds

& the bones that hold me up to air have no body.

The cord, a tunnel for riversóturbines

churning and grinding, spitting out air.

FAN II

Out of orbit, three blades, 

a trinity of air.

Water-smoothed stones

gather the dust of time and neglect

inside the silver cage.

In deep summer, yellow string flutters

like yellow tropical fish called tang

against the current.

The bones that hold me up 

are not corporal.

Turbines churn and grind

shoving the air forward into day

& nothing more.

My inspiration, vocal

I speak of the air

& rotate like the planets.

2/27/89

IN AN OPEN BOAT

IN AN OPEN BOAT

These days just keep going on with no end. 
I keep waiting for the tide to come in. 
and contemplate the deep ripples in the mud. 
Deeper rifts in the Atlantic. The tropics. 
Steam off the surface of the sea at dawn. 
Fish dreams. I awoke, thinking of Gary's
strong arms rowing against a cellophane sea. 
And how we talked of Stephen Crane's story, 
The Open Boat, we were caught in a riptide,
talking of fear and of starvation. 
There is a self-consciousness in fear. 
I kept looking for shark fins 
in his beguiling blue eyes.

6/1985
freewrite
added 2/18
slightly rev.

Under full moon, June 1985 (garbled text)

Under full moon, the Bahamas

We float in the sea
Slow speech drips off rocks like memory
My mother calls me home in her dreams
A conch shell sounded nine times
Bring home the fish because
weeping willow leaves drift in the pond
Ducks chatter. The one lost by the art building 

Closed doors lead to fragrant lawns
I am falling from Daphne's shoulders
following a green mirror from the pond.

Like some burial ground in front of me,
Water wars like banshees in the hills
Real cause,  mother plays piano softly
A young girl in taffeta rustles

there is nowhere else left to go 

(Missing text)
has feathers missing from his neck.
where Persephone emerges into sunlight 
with one hand shadowing her eyes.

Stillness. Redwood like a lake after rain. 
Swollen clearwater chokes bracken ferns and sedges.

This hand uncovers ghosts of the past.
after the fog has lifted. 
Irises whisper to each other 
on the opposite shore.


6/1985


NEED DATE   (garbled text)

EXODUS, EXILE AND DESIRE

EXODUS, EXILE AND DESIRE

Clouds cover the moon like a map of Africa

and the moon breaks through the continents.

Beneath the sweet, almost foetid odor of frangipani,

blue-tailed lizards mate,

thrusting ocher bibs of ruffled lace

and arch their backs to a silent calypso.

Distant thunder wraps itself in sheets of ghost lightning.

Arawak Indians once lined conch shells

along the eastern shores of these islands

to remind the sun of its feathered cloak.

We eat sweet white meat of the conch.

What's no longer needed is thrown back into the jungle.

The barracuda sleeps and the shark is hungry.

As we bathe in the sea,

bone-white lilies of our arms

blossom under the full moon.

Translucent fish slide between my thighs.

The fan turns slowly in an empty room.

5/85

1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch
1991 Poet Magazine
1988 Chaminade Literary Review
         Women's Voices
1987 Blue Window

Monster from the Deep, Bahamas

This morning I take coffee black, alone, in the main house. The residents are off to work and the guests are sleeping, or swimming at Orange Beach. Something moves in the bouganvilla. A cat?

Banana leaves clatter like a hard rain against the veranda. I keep thinking I'm in the middle of a mystery novel about a writer who uncovers a crime while researching the latest book. James Bond, and all that.

This place strips us bare. I can't tell the dreaming from the waking. The clock rattles at 7 a.m. The maid asks how I want my eggs. My watch reads 4 a.m., Pacific time. Maid?

Dave Evans, founder of the Napa Valley Poetry Conference, is the brainchild and midwife of this exotic adventure into poetry. The cast of poets is pretty extraordinary too. With the underwriting of a famous novelist's wife, we've managed to relocate the entire conference from the Napa wine country to the Bahamas. We are all poets in residence here.

I arrived in the archipelago of some 700 atolls and islands spread across 550 miles, a week early to help with the conference. But I spend most of my free time in the sea. I can't get enough of it. Dave is as red as a lobster. Kristine Lauretsen is a golden goddess. We drive to the tiny airport to welcome the poets.

Nearly all the poets come from California, and a few from New York, to attend this first international Bahamas writers' conference: a movable feast devours us.

But the sea is my siren call. Every dawn I hitch up my red pareau, precariously clinging to moist flesh, and head for the beach. My feet leave blue tracks in the pink sand. I take in humid mouthfuls of air. When I rise out of the ocean wearing my mask and snorkel, someone—Gary Sange—tells me I'm a monster rising from the deep.

Fish dream while awake. I dreamed my mother called out to me and a conch shell sounded nine times to call the fish back home to the burial ground. Carolyn Forché tells me to pull up my hidden memory. I take in a mouthful and choke on this confusion of sea and air.

Tongue of Ocean. Saline rivers 10,000 feet deep. Islands in the stream. I think of Hemmingway with his six-toed cats. But I'm not a fisherman. I take a quarter-mile swim. The shore is almost hidden by rolling swells. I am so far from home.

Lucayan Arawak Indians once lined conch shells along the eastern shore of these islands to remind the sun of its feathered cloak. We eat sweet, white meat of the conch. What's no longer needed is thrown back into the jungle. The barracuda sleeps and the shark is hungry.

Columbus named the island San Salvador, within 25 years all 50,000 of the Lycayans were dead. Words from the Lucayan: canoe, cannibal, hammock, hurricane and tobacco.

Shells and sea grass line the small turquoise dory. Gary Sange and I row out to the staghorn coral forests and talk of Crane's "Open Boat." We're near-twins both born in San Francisco, but he teaches in Virginia, and talks constantly about his wife, a ballet dancer. We watch iridescent turquoise triggerfish with flanged cobalt brows turn from lime-green to yellow. He talks about her so much, I almost know her name. Our anchor knocks off a piece of staghorn coral. It sounds like glass breaking. We're killing the reef with our carelessness.

Bob Hass tells us, "Try and avoid the verb, "to be" in your writing. He and Carolyn Forché take scuba tanks down with an unlicensed guide. Bob's respirator fails. Last week, at 30 feet, someone drowned. He is abruptly reminded that the word conspiracy is to breathe together.

When Bob's childhood sweetheart and wife learned the lump was benign, they wildly celebrate, the rejoice, but we notice the mantle of her being is separating from Bob's. I like her tall blonde ranginess. There is a lovely unpretentiousness about her. We are both natives of Marin. It is an unexpected bond this far from home.

Sharon Doubiago says, "One of the names for death is Blondie." Dave will meet Blondie soon enough when he returns home to Napa. Bob's wife has escaped death this time, but her marriage doesn't.

The pufferfish rolls his peacock-blue eyes at me, takes grave insult, and indignantly puffs up the size of a grapefruit when I yank his tail with my toes. No sign of the parrot fish's sleeping mantle.

Dead sea grass sticks to my body like confetti. I'm a Junkanoo festival in goombay time. I dive into sea grass to look for a shadow, the rippled edge of a shell. Gary is my unofficial dive partner, but I ditch him because the sea calls me like a secret lover to school me in the ways of Aprhodite.

Sharon argues with Gary Sange over the merits of formal education. The Bible and the L.A. Times were her writing teachers. She said, "I began writing prose to fill in the gaps in my personal history." Gary's a formalist. They come to an impasse of near blows. I hold my tongue. Sharon is my friend. Gary is my friend.

From above, the queen conch blends in with the white sandy bottom. The edible conch has spires that cast shadows, making it easier to spot. The waves also cast rippling shadows on the sea bed.

Midnight swim. Something followed me in the water. Nothing I could see—just a presence as if it were watching my back. The night holds more terror for me than the sea.

Marcella Taylor asks us to write about our recurring dreams and landscapes. And to address the goddess within ourselves. The goddess is undressing me until I am bone-naked.

At Nassau Harbor, mountains of conch shells line the shore—some are the size of a man's head. From shells of these large sea snails, artificial reefs line the shore like thousands of discarded pink dentures. We voraciously eat a spicy aphrodisiac of conch fritters, and marinated conch salad pickled with peppers and lime.

Aphrodite's arms. So many of us slipping off for secret assignations. My first night here, a Bahamian fed me fritters but I knew what was up. I spend my free time alone as my man, John Oliver Simon, is at home waiting for me.

A fisherman complains how the conch is getting scarcer on New Providence Island. He has to dive deeper and farther from shore on the outer islands. One of the most promising of the young Bahamian writers, Garth is from Catt Island. He tells us stories Andros Island is where the freshwater wells rise and fall with the tides.

Fresh water floats above the saline river. The water is brackish and my thirst deepens. With red hibiscus behind our ears, we dance to the steel drum and rasping saw. I prefer the left ear, and come to find that means I'm free. Owned by no man.

Scattered coins: hundreds of sand dollars in the sand bank. Casinos with no clocks. "Those of us who live here can't gamble, even us Americans," E.Lane Moore tells me.

From this harvest of the Deep, huge bleached urchins nestle like pale loaves of the fishermen. When the moon is on the water, the barracuda comes collecting.

As we bathe in the sea,
bone white lilies of our arms
blossom under the full moon.
Translucent fish slide between my thighs.
Distant thunder wraps itself in sheets
of ghost lightning.

This morning, the reef breaks through blue silk and is wreathed in whitecaps. A lace gown on the sea.

Storm at sea.

One begins to understand the yielding shape of a palm tree during a storm.

"When the hurricanes come, the wind howls like a banshee. Then it's calm. Don't go outside. That's the middle of the eye of the storm," one of the Bahamian poets tells us. "Then it begins again. We fill the bathtubs with water. Everybody drinks and parties until it goes away."

Beyond the reef, a boy diving behind the boat is attacked by sharks and doesn't survive. I am chastised for sneaking out and diving alone. Again.

A barge of brackish water from Florida arrives to ease the tourist drought in the Cable Beach condominiums. The tourists and the unslakable thirst of casuarina trees and cotton suck the land dry. This is a desert jungle.

"We're beginning to see beyond the postcard vision," said Carolyn.

A crimson beach fig leaf stains the stone cannon and cart in front of the decayed colonial mansion facing the sea. Discarded blood. They say Bluebeard slept here.

Bob tells us the story of Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea." Jane Eyre's story from the other perspective. "Calabanisms, he said. "How the colonial mentality separates you from yourself."

The Bahamas was a colony of Great Britain until 1973, and though 85% Black, the real power rested in the hands of a few Anglo Bay Street Boys. "But," Nathanial Mackey comments, "The structure doesn't change. Only the color of the skin does."

Marcella Taylor says, "I have non-exclusive feelings of race and nationality. I have problems with national boundaries."

In "The Gulf," Jamaican poet Derek Walcott writes,"The process by which the poet writes is the vehicle to establish a national identity."

One Bahamian writer tells us," I don't know who I am. I'm not West Indies. I don't fit in with the Blacks, and in England I'm looked upon as a colonist. What am I supposed to be?"

The question of identity in the Bahamas is also a question of race. Many Bahamians refer to a constructed history which doesn't predate the end of slavery.

Nate Mackey observes, "This alienation is not theoretical."

Another Bahamian writer complains,"I have no stories to write about. My life is not interesting, not like yours." She recounts how her great-grandfather was thrown overboard in a wooden box and he landed on an uninhabited outer island. We sit, transfixed.

Carolyn and Bob tell them, "We came here to learn from you. We don't know your literature. You tell us."

We are not neo-colonialists come to re-enforce 300 years of dominant culture. We want to learn about the emerging genre of Bahamian writing by becoming students with them.

Until 1974, the Bahamas did not have educational institutions beyond high school which most of the Black population did not attend. The only place to get published is at College of the Bahamas, with its preoccupation for proper 19th c. British forms. It's all about mimicking Keats and Shelley.

There are two dialects: Queen's English and nation-speak, which is closer to our New Orleans dialect. Or Creole. Bahamians are careful to speak only Queen's English to us.

Someone asks, "Did you go over the hill yet?" A rite of passage. Blue Hill. Fox Hill. Hills here are relative. Yes, there are picturesque buckled houses with layers of blistered paint in brilliant hues. No windows or water.

A red leaf among the green like a snake in the garden. Fodder for our poetic appetites.

The land snails I collect in the jungle crawl away during the night. I follow glistening trails.

Bob Hass asks us, "What is opposite in your childhood that you poetically crave?"

Like cumbersome crabs, we swimmers crawl out of the ocean. A Black man walking along the shore sings out, "Hey coconut! Buy some." A woman selling shell necklaces croons, "Be good to me, Honey!" Gary indulges her.

Flame trees and tequila sunsets grate against an opalescent sea. The image of the full golden moon against silhouetted palms trees still won't leave me.

Sharon tells us, "Coming to another country, your consciousness changes."

All right, I'll admit I came here because I thought it sounded exotic. By day, ragged children sell shells by the docks and by night they steal water from the hotels.

He g'wan roun,
catch de drops o' wahter in da night.
Over da hill, he g'wan
roun.

The insidiousness of poverty settles into the psyche like a fine dust. Jungle flowers carry the pervasive odor of decay. Transplanted European ruins and casinos inhabit Paradise Island. We read poetry in a 14th century cloister transported from France.

I wait for the statue of Persephone to emerge into sunlight with one hand shadowing her face, and walk down these long corridors roofed by clouds to listen to the man reading poetry in her garden.

She stood in rapt attention for so long,
her marble features have softened.
Hoarded iron from slave ships
stained these white columns
and rust shavings blossomed in the sea.

"Down at da bridge. Get some snow, here. Only a dollah!"

I go over the hill and begin to see past the postcard. Sweet frangipani, almost foetid. Foliage entwines with rusted cans, bottles and conch shells glowing pink—a salmon sunset nestled in the leathery green leaves.

Rotting conch flesh claws my nostrils leading me deeper into the jungle. A feeling of trespass overcomes me as if we were peering up the skirts of our dead grandmothers—expecting to find a lover.

Marcella asks us to write what kind of animal we are.

At the governor's palace we're invited to tea and we stuff ourselves on delicate sandwiches as scantily clad models stalk down the ramp. Lady Cash officially welcomes us to the Bahamas.

This hand uncovers ghosts from the past. I photograph a jacket slung over a marble rail, sleeves luffing in the wind, like a boat without oars.

The van lurches down dirt roads, past shacks on stilts where kerosene lanterns illumine old men sitting in doorstoops. Barefoot kids run in front of us, shrieking with laughter. Only their teeth and the whites of their eyes shine in this darkness.

A small boy carries water in plastic gallon jugs. A slumbering pig on a tether grunts and returns to dreaming. A revival church with brilliant electric light jars me into the 20th century.

The sea breathes outside my window. The ceiling fan whispers to itself something I can't understand. A stranded cockroach buzzes in circles on his back. Mindful of them, we learn to shuffle our feet in the darkness.

A maid straightens up the day's clutter. I'm growing used to the maid. It's becoming easier to make invisible slaves, but our poetry is becoming rawboned.

What can one say that hasn't been said before about the tropics that hasn't been depicted on every postcard from here to Tahiti? Nathanial says it's possible to enter the consciousness of another.

Hot noon on an outer island.
The hermit crab,
afraid to leave his shell, died.

A small lesson of survival is illustrated for us. We have 128 circadian rhythms that control us during the course of a day making it difficult to adjust time.

Liquid silver eyes of translucent surf minnows—miniature eclipses swimming between my fingers. At home it will be hours before dawn breaks. At home, I will remember what Sharon said about us being aliens here. But I will also be an alien at home too.

When the sea grass dies,
it is whiter than this beach.

From here, my tracks look like those of a sea turtle. I ate the forbidden meat of the conch and dreamed of a thin man who came in darkness to kill me. My monsters become more tangible in this place. I waken to the thin reed sound of my own screaming.

Caught in a rip tide, I swim toward my dive partner, Gary, but I am trapped in a wall of water and I swim until I am exhausted. I hold his life in my hands. I am responsible for him. He swims farther out in the sea garden, oblivious of the danger. I have no choice but to follow him. Terror reigns. I break through the rip tide and it eventually carries us both safely to shore. I do not tell him of the danger we faced. He is new to the sea, swimming with confidence. My almost twin.

Marcella tells us the unconscious and poetry are alike. "Fiction focuses on a period of time. Try for a border between the conscious and unconscious."

She sends us out into the jungle alone. It begins to rain. I write, "There are trees here that have no names." But then, because they have no names, I can't continue. Nouns define and separate species.

Bob says,"What I like about poetry is that it's like lightning. The heart starts rushing toward some answers. Try and contradict yourself early on in the poem." But it's really about verbs after all.

A small nurse shark swims beneath my thighs. Cat eyes curious, she follows us in a slow game of tag a half a mile from shore. I hold out the queen conch in offering. Sensing danger, its mantle begins to coil around the lip of the shell, and my fingers like a large tongue.

The shark ignores the offering knowing it's inedible. Attracted by the minute traces of blood from my period, the shark follows us expectantly, waiting. Its ventral slits rhythmically opening and closing with the rise and falling of water.

Barbels, whiskers brush us as it circles. Through our snorkels we nervously laugh and look for the mother lurking on the edge of this murky celadon bowl.

As Gary and I head in, the shore slips beneath the distant thin green punctuation between sea and sky. We can only return to the sea as visitors.

An air bubble suspends a green bottle above the sand so that the neck scribbles unintelligible marks on the rippled bottom. We dive down and free the bottle from its tedious task. A guitarfish sweeps his mantle over hundreds of bottles filled with saline brew.

In the scrub brush along the cliffs, I find a bag of women's clothing. I look for bodies in the undergrowth.

My soul sleeps in the tropics
and I am separated from myself
for long periods of time.
Clouds cover the moon like a map of Africa.
Beneath the odor of frangipani,
blue-tailed lizards mate,
thrust out ochre bibs of ruffed lace.

Carolyn reminds us to keep our appointments with the muse, to pull up our hidden memory, and clarify our private emotions. Follow our inner rhythms.

Nathanial says, "Remember this small family of words, this endangered species. Think about your own boundaries as writers."

Bob adds, "Art is dialectical; it speaks in opposites. One way to tell the truth is to break all the rules."

Weightless, we drift in aquamarine and come up for air like seals. Sharon crests a mountainous wave as I slide into a trough. We dive for shells and collect fragments of poetry.

The wind catches her words and flings them over her shoulder like sea spray. I watch her lips move. I taste salt at the corners of my mouth. I taste the bitterness of this place. Bleached limestone cliffs push against a skin of jungle like bones jutting from the carcass of a dead animal.

The old sea bottom of coral and shell blinds me, reflecting the light back into my eyes.

Recipe: Begin each morning by returning to the cradle. Tread water. Feel salt sting on the lips. Breathe in humid air where the slow speech of words foams over the reef.

Begin.

Summer of 1985


© 1985 Maureen Hurley, at Orange Hill, Nassau Island, Bahamas. Portions of this essay have appeared in Caribbean Writer and the Nassau Guardian. Glenna Luschei was supposed to make an anthology of our Bahama writing, and asked me to revise this, then never made the book. Story of my life. I remember being stuck on it, under deadline, and John Oliver Simon helped me revise it, banging away on his upright typewriter, circa September, 1985, when it reached its present form, but I'm posting it here for proximity purposes.

rev. 2007, and 2014

BE WITH ME

Be with me where reefs,
bone-white coral beaches sing
and wisdom ripens in the sun,
where casuarina needles litter the sea
and where mango forests and cotton trees
drain the water from the land.

Be with me where the mating dance
of the tree climbing lizards,
bluetail lizards and mouse lizards
arch their tails and push their backs up
and thrust okra throat pouches like fandancers,
in a calypso rhythm to the sun.

Be with me in the humid tropical night
when the distant thunder
dressed in ghostly sheets of lightning
covers our arms that are bone-white lilies
under the full moon, as we bathe in the sea
where the barracuda sleeps
and the shark is hungry.

Be with me where  clouds cover the moon
and it becomes a map of Africa.
The moon breaks out through Ethiopia,
Africa is three times larger than America,
we cannot hide the bleached bones
of colonial slaves who toiled in the cotton fields,
and the sugar plantations
of these wayward islands.

Be with me where we danced to steel drums
rasping through the torpid night
with hibiscus behind our ears
and our hips meshed to an ancient rhythm.

Be with me where Arawak Indians
once gathered peach-lipped conch shells
along the eastern shores to
remind the sun of its feathered cloak.

Be with me where the fish of rainbow skins
slide between my legs in translucent opal hues
as the ocean breathes beside me,
as the night falls from the sky
to the ground and shatters into sorrow
and sunset slips from the private conch shells.

Be with me on this raft of a bed,
and may these damp sheets be like love
turning the fan slowly in an empty room.
Be with me,
and may I always be with you.
Always.

5/17/1985
slightly rev. for clarity, added 2/18
John Oliver Simon's California Poetry Heritage workshop
with Mona Lisa Saloy at John Swett School, Oakland, CA

PHOTOGRAPHING RUINS ON PARADISE ISLAND, BAHAMAS

A colonist, homesick for Europe

shipped the ruins of a medieval cloister

to Paradise Island to remind himself

of the heritage he'd lost in what he called

a savage tropic land. One hand shadowing

her neoclassic features, a marble Persephone

in exile, longing for the harsh familiarity of winter,

gazes homeward across the immutable

aquamarine bell curve of sea and sky.

I came here because it sounded exotic.

Nearby, someone begins to play the piano.

Waves of clapping echo from the terraced garden

sloping seaward to where the slow speech of water

foams over the reef. High tea under palm trees

and a preoccupation of things British.

Lace trimming the uniform of the Black maid

serving coconut cake crackles like paper doilies

on the grass like unseasonable snow.

Another wave of gentry feeds from her dark hands.

Tea leaves in the cup arranged in familiar patterns.

Music wafts through knit branches of immigrant casuarinas.

This hand uncovers ghosts

of transplanted nuns, five centuries dead,

starched habits rustling like palm fronds,

wandering down corridors open to balmy skies,

who are puzzled by the perpetual weather

and the presence of lovers on a moss-covered marble couch,

their skin covered with green except the places

where admirers have touched for good luck.

I am voyeur to the other side of paradise.

On the docks, thin boys dressed in polyester rags,

new poverty from the age of technology,

sell pink-lipped conch shells to tourists,

and they pirate water at night from park spigots

because brackish wells are no longer sweet.

A terrestrial paradise, transformed by slave ships.

Hoarded iron stained these white columns,

and rusted shackles blossomed in this sea.

Death is not a practitioner of apartheid.

It strips skin from bones of Blacks and Whites with equanimity.

Intrigued by the contrast, I photograph

a jacket slung over a marble railó

sleeves luffing in the wind like a boat without oars.

With his mattock, a gardener dresses the thin soil

where only limestone endured the ravages of cotton

and sugar cane plantations. Molasses, rum and oranges.

His hands coax tender English grass into fecundity.

Beneath my palm, pitted marble columns weather

under tropical sun, like coral, like bone.

I dreamed my mother called out to me

and a conch shell sounded nine times

to call the fish back home to the burial ground.

5/85 Bahamas rev. 87
1989 The Caribbean Writer, Vol 3

POEM FOR A SCULPTURE

Blue lavender waves
break over boiling lava
in muted colors
mist rises from a snow bed
of warm sand—red purple waves
holes to fall into
oceans to swim out of
a buddha to sit on the ledge with
a standing wave
a crevice for your thoughts.

We painted our dreams
on our faces
on our bodies
red for the earth
we took our dreams into ourselves
into our bodies into our bodies.

poem for a sculpture of Michael's
the Bahamas May 1985









Hot pink and tuna
at the Governor's tea,
Nassau

Hot pink and tuna
there is a little bit of running
slinky chipper jouncing hips
hot pink and tea
with bouncing tits
sashaying ass
and Randy in his blue
ambrosia
crystals cool
yellow sands
tuna and hot pink tea
enjoyable afternoon.
Junkanoo Junkanoo
you see the difference
the music makes it strict
Junkanoo
boo-boo woo hoo
cuckoo mumu
junk junk junk a noo
a new cowbells big ass trumpets
crystal liberated
a Bantu warrior in hot pink.


the Bahamas May 1985

BONE-CHINA

In a terraced rose garden

we delicately sip afternoon tea

in cups made from the bones

of bison that once browsed

an ocean of grass.

Seeking equations, we talk

of neo-colonialism and drought

while history resurrects itself

beneath thirsty casuarinas & ironwood.

Lizards hieroglyph the dimpled sand—

the thin tropical soil, robbed of identity.

The ravenous night falls

like an axe from the sky.

The light trapped in coral sand

and the bone-white lilies of our arms

blossom under a full moon.

Heavy dampness in the sheets:

the fan toils in an empty room—

a pale shadow of the wind

no one will cipher.

Orange Beach, the Bahamas,

5/85; rev.7/30/93

NUNS, PARADISE ISLAND

NUNS  (outakes)

I imagine the presence of nuns
five centuries dead, habits
rustling like palm fronds
as they walk down these
corridors open to the sky.
In the courtyard, shadows collect
in pools on marble skin.
A colonist lonesome for France
shipped the 14th century cloister
to Paradise Island to remind himself
of the genteel heritage he's lost
in this savage land. In a nearby house,
someone begins to play the piano.
A gardener's hand dresses the soil.
The pitted marble column beneath my palm
has weathered under the tropical sun
like coral, like bone.

5/85

Starfish drawing, Bahamas

San Francisco to the Bahamas at 27,000 feet

April 26, 1985

Below me is an unnamed lake in a bowl tinged with green mountains on the west. One  side of the range is green, the other is brown, in a rain shadow.

The Central Valley and the edge of the Mohave Desert, a dividing line of plenty rain and no rain. Soft undulations of land and hills give way to pinnacles and mesas, fantastic forms, and the patchwork of crops along the I-5 highway.

Trees cluster on the north sides of slopes, etched on the steep mountainsides, are giant stairstep terraces, from the departure of the great inland seas and lakes. 

Waves of topsoil flow from one field to the next. Commuting in the wind. Playing out the dustbowl. Again. You can literally see the wind patterns in this great inverted bowl. The Imperial Valley is moving itself southward towards even less fertile ground.

It's agribusiness as usual, enormous grades and scars from where small farms once stood, now turned to alkali flats. Toxic nitrogen poisoning in the soil. We passed an enormous cloud of dust that hangs over the middle of the valley like a brown fog bank, but it's too early for the photosynthesis of smog at 8 AM.

Miami is almost 3000 miles away. For every thousand miles, the clock goes forward an hour. It takes the sun three hours to travel across the state, not distance as the crow flies, but distance as the sun shines, or as the Earth turns. 

We travel down the West Coast, the plane buckles in the wind. Air is something you can't see or touch. But if you take one quart of air and compress it into a pint, you have a working knowledge of E = MC2. It's all relative. 

How do I tell the kids what Einstein is remembered for: the bomb, and he is responsible for Reagan being in office? Write him a cowboy poem about how life used to be. Write him a postcard of what you will miss. That redwood tree. Because I haven't yet seen them all.

Brown brown brown San Fernando Valley. Alkali peeling off like skin from the sunburnt earth. Runoff hurries down to the sinkholes before the sun plays havoc with it. Small truck farms fringing the edge of existence.

Below me, is the trajectory and support system of the space shuttle. Call it Edwards AFB. Call it China Basin. Mothballed planes. And Jim just cinched up his car, belly kicked it, and drove south across the Mojave, just like that—so desolate, hills freckled with creosote and mesquite.

Dry riverbed – the Colorado? Funny circular irrigation: Israeli style farming kibbutzim? Kidney-shaped farms. Renal failure? A vast circular disc glints: maybe it's a colander in the desert. Panamint Mountains emerge from under a low tide of drifting sandstorms, that obliterate the view of the Sierras.

Reservoirs and dams abound, like small jewels in a land so arid, even the river can't coax the green out of its banks. Borax mines further south, drain the sky of color. White noise of the desert, extinct species, and dry riverbeds meander through the silent desert.

Now you can see the oases: 29 Palms. I wanna know who counted them all, and if they got it exactly right. Will they have to change the name of the town if another palm tree grows, or dies?

You can't have an oasis without a drought. So many beginnings and endings of dreams in this agricultural desert, this cultural desert, this emotional, just desserts? People come, and go, but the desert remains, obdurate as an enigma, this is the truest face of the desert.

The last plane I rode in, you couldn't see out the windows because the sharp ash of Mount Saint Helens had ground the surface into frost. Helens—why is she plural? Is she more than one duality? Sovereign mount?

We fly back out to the coast. The fringe of habitable land. Living on the western edge of this continent becomes a real phrase. Owning language, reclaiming it, mean what you say. Say that again until it becomes you, and you become it. 

Like geography, I remember making that topo map of California out of dough and salt on the rusted stove. Grease catcher tray, little top knob at the Mexican border. My mother's blue oil paints became the inland sea. I painted. I remember feeling ashamed because my map looked so different from the other kids' maps, but I used what tools I had.

Magnificent cloud formations across tumulous clouds, or is it cumulous tombstones? Rain and a dusting of fresh snow on the peaks. A desert plateau with precipitation, is a gentler desert.

The buttes jigsaw together, I marvel at how the land fits sublimely together. On the banks of this conundrum, houses and greenery. Clouds change they become cirrus, they become fog, as we enter into the heart and the soul of clouds patterns, changing slowly with the shape of the land.

I never seem to tire of looking at the land from above, it's pure magic. We fly sandwiched in a free zone between two cloud formations. Quite bold, white below. Flying over Arizona. 

Poor dear Stephanie. I am not response from my pain. Did she object to the line where I wrote how the Arizona sun is soaking her dry? We were best friends once. But years go by without a letter, without a call. So much flatland out there. Arizona? Texas? How did she suffer in her silence? I grieve for her. My best friend.

And Jim, I forgot his address, he's down there in the suburbs—somewhere in Houston. After all this time, I'm surprised by how much I miss him, and I don't know what to make of his wife Rochelle calling me up on their 18th anniversary just to have somebody to talk to. Didn't think I would miss the friendship. 

Carolyn says you feel all this because at one time you really loved him. It was over at least a year ago, it was really over. I guess the body never forgets. We made love before he left. It was dry like the back of the throat after a bad dream, and a thirst that leaves you wanting.ut not for more.

And now Geoff. God, I sure know how to pick them. One minute wanting to live with him, be with him, have babies. Then he goes away to Fiji for three months. And I go through it all. Again. The doubts the fears, should I, or shouldn't I, and the decision is out of my hands once again. In balance. What do I do this time? Stick around? Like I did with Lee? Become a masochist? 

Last vacation, it was Jim I was pining for, this time, it's Geoff. Will I spend all my vacations mooning over one man or another? With Geoff, it forced me to consider what I wanted out of life, besides make babies, that is. Something I do have to come to terms with, and soon. 

I am ambitious. I want recognition. I am getting it slowly, slowly. I have a fear sometimes, but my writing isn't good enough, so I do a little bit of everything to make up for it. Journalism, photography, anything to get my name, my persona out there—and it does. But what are my goals? How do I envision survival one, two or five years from now? 

Part of me wants the whole ball of wax, the kids, the home, the dream. But it's not real, though billions of people go through the motions. Desperate, like the cat wanting in, only to want out again. It becomes a dream of nirvana. Or rather, the Maya veil. 

I can also picture the other side too. I know how awful it can be to be tied down with responsibilities that I couldn't get out of. I thought of Geoff. Would I be the type of woman to abandon her children for a career if it came to that? Assuming it didn't work out but that's just how love is. Be with a man of few years, have kids, and then what? 

A fragile thing, love, but maybe that ball of wax is the placebo. I think I won't have to worry about supporting myself if I have a relationship with kids. I won't have to worry about the future because I will no longer be in control. Then there's no fear of failure but it's a case of real bad yeah-buts. Is important to keep a clear perspective and not be flooded with emotions and fantasies of a life not lived.

Not having children, is that something I can live with that without? Sure, if I wanted to. I could find an anonymous father, or a turkey baster, but that's not what I want. I want love too. 

This is a very occasional diary journal. I write this stuff when I travel because this is the only time when I'm free. Free of the confines of home and the narrow paths. Last year, I made a vow to travel two times a year. So I could free myself. Perspectives are so different. 

Geoff took off for three months of travel, already his perspectives have changed, and what he writes of now, is not having to own the other person's life. Fear of what? Jealousy? Need, let it go? To hold your need in your hands, there's the question.

There is a strange shimmering blue light below the clouds, or should I say, between the clouds and the land. It looks like water. Must have something to do with atmospheric conversion, illusion more got a Fata Morgana. A mirage. All that flat land, the wonder of it all with no boundaries.

Below me is a dam, and another reservoir, the land is so flat that the waterways training into the lakes are backed up for miles, and there are many lakes. Two huge links. We must be flying over Texas right now. Three and four huge reservoirs. Maybe it's Phoenix, Lake Havasu or Lake Powell? The waterways go on for miles and miles and the distance never comes closer, not matter how far you travel.

April 26, 1985

slightly revised 11/8/2015.

FLYING OFF TO THE BAHAMAS

Something about flying off
unhinges the door to creativity.
My inner dialogue begins.
I'm putting it all together. Bits & pieces.
What I learned in fourth grade,
as I sculpted California from salt dough
was that I could make do with what I had,
despite my classmates' jeering.
Eva Poole invited me to teach poetry
at Lone Pine and I can't go. So bummed.
So many poetry invites this week.
But I am enroute to the Bahamas.
I ran into Jeannie Bogardus today
at San Francisco international Airport.
She's now with City Celebration.
No more Bread & Roses, she, who hired me.
Today, Carolyn Kizer wins the Pulitzer
for "Yin." God knows she deserves it.
She's been passed over so many times.
Her dead mother's ashes, nestled
in the closet amid all those size 11 shoes,
and mink coats, would approve.


April 24, 1985
rev. slightly 8/11/2015