FIRST LOVE

FIRST LOVE

     —after Billy Collins' Going Out for Cigarettes

The story goes, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. 

Nothing famous about it. One day, he 

walked out, moved back to the suburbs. 

They took him in, swallowed him up,

it was a slow suicide of self. 

I never heard from him again, 

not a letter, not a phone call, nada. 

I mourned for what was lost. 

It was as if those seven years were for naught. 

In seven years our cells replace themselves. 

We were not the same—even though seven years 

was a marriage sentence of sorts. He left me in spring 

when the words began to rise like first sap.

He left me when I became a writer, 

as if the words themselves were unfaithful wives. 

As if I needed the corpse of experience to hone 

and sharpen my nascent sullied craft.

Decades later, his first girlfriend, Dulcie—

whom he had left for me, 

and then in a boomerang move, 

he left me again for her—we became friends, 

we shared war stories that mirrored each other.

We were sisters of the same cloth, 

rent with holes and jagged three-corner tears. 

It was as if Bob had become a lost vanishing point, 

a two-point perspective laid down in lead,

the horizon-line on an architectural drawing, 

disappearing into the infinite, off the edges of the page,

only to reappear in the house of memory 

like a möbius strip endlessly repeating its cycle.

But theses days, no one can hide forever.

We found him on the Internet. The woman he married 

looked a lot like me, but her sullen face said it all.

Needing to put old dogs to rest, Dulcie wrote to him, 

but silence was the loud reply. What did she expect?

You can't teach an old dog....

However, his sister was delighted to hear from us,

as he had given her the cold shoulder too—

just like he gave us so many years ago.

A family gift from his long dead father.

We put Bob to rest that day, no more 

dog-eared pages or sticky forays into the past.

Some 40 years later, I’m still wedded to my word-wives,

those dark rubies glistening like blood.

2/2/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class  First final draft.

Seeking Robert Bruce Hamilton (again)

In the process of trying to track down my first true love, Robert Bruce Hamilton, wondering if he's even on this earth, I can't find a thing on the internet. It's strange in this day and age, not to have some sort of an internet presence. We've been hunting for Sweet Old Bob for seven long years now. Dulcie, was his first girlfriend, both before, during, and after—me (yes, you read that right—I met him after they broke up, then he left me, for her). At least we think he was a serial monogamist. What can I say, it was Marin, during the 1970s. We have been shaking down any leads we can find. No luck. Trying to track Robert Bruce Hamilton or Bob Hamilton is impossible, as it's such a common name.

I never expected to become friends with Dulcie, but she found me via the internet, in August, 2012, from a blog post I wrote on SoB, and she felt compelled to tell me her side of the story. Kindred soul. Our correspondence fell away after a few months, but we finally met at the end of 2016. Since then, our friendship has evolved in other directions—other than Bob, that is. Then the question inevitably arises: is he still alive?

Growing up redneck in Nevada County

Nevada County was fiercely and proudly redneck during the 1970s—even towards their own prodigal white native sons, born and raised in the fold s of their tight-knit community. There was no place for their returning sons who were drafted, and fought for their country—when they returned. They, who saw the light and grew their hair long. This was no county that recognized a passport for weirdness, or otherness. This is why my Sweet Old Bob didn't move back home, he was harassed for his hair. In those days they hurled epithets and beer bottles at us as we drove by in our VW bus. Xenophobia was alive and well and living in Grass Valley. Why we never moved back and settled down. Of course, not it the epicenter for coolness. Not not for those of us who were among the first to return home to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range, what Ansel Adams, dubbed The Range of Light.

MY ANTI-BUCKET LIST

Climbing Half Dome a 3rd time is on my anti-bucket list.
Never again. What was I thinking the 2nd time around?
On the way back down, I developed a fear of heights.
I sat on the ledge at Glacier Point, beyond the guardrail. 
I also sat on the lip of Half Dome. What was I thinking?

When I climbed Yosemite Falls, I had a high fever,
the view from above was to die for, but not worth dying for.
Coming down the slot canyon was a total bitch.

I probably won't climb Mt. Whitney again.
I  crawled on hands and knees, across the summit,
a knifeback ridge with a straight drop off on either side.
I practically kissed the rocks at the top.
Then I had to descend. What was I thinking?

I will never again climb the crevice at Sonora Pass,
the view from the ridgetop was stunning,
but then I had to back down the chimney,
I was fatigued, with overtaxed muscles.
My boyfriend guided me down, step by step,
but to fall, sans ropes, would be certain death.

I have literally scaled the heights of Machu Picchu.
Another climb I will not do again, is Huayna Picchu,
with that loose steel cable barely anchored to the cliff,
I probably won't hike the Machu Picchu trail again either.
My knees simply wouldn't make it.
Ah, impetuous youth, well-spent.

4/27/18

MOUNTAIN MISERY

Someone wanted an identification of a wild lily,
once called Zigadine, now Toxicoscordion fremontii.
My eyeballs weren't yet awake. Batting 50/50,
I mis-ID the bearmat as gold-back fern.
Then realized no self-respecting gold-back fern
would ever grow out in the open like that.
And the location, pine foothills...
But I know a death camas when I see it.

I loved saying the old name, Zigadine!
One of the few Latin plant names I know by heart.
The way it explodes off the tongue
and becomes something like shooting stars.
I never once called it a Fremont lily,
for John C. Frémont was a toxic mass-murderer
of the California Indians. And he fomented a revolt
for personal gain, choosing a bear as his bandolier.

I never knew the other moniker, and was horrified
to discover that I had transplanted death camas
to our lower field where we grazed horses in spring.
No wonder the gophers always left it alone.
And luckily, the horses did too.

As for the bearmat, aka kit-kit-dizze, 
which is also a placename where
poet Gary Snyder lives, on North San Juan Ridge.
My old boyfriend from Grass Valley,
who admired Gary Snyder from afar,
and accidentally introduced me to poetry,
said that the bears liked to roll on it.

I loved the tarry odor of the leaves, but they're clingy.
Some folks call it mountain misery, or bear clover.
Despite its lovely white rose petal blossoms,
bearmat is the bane of careless hikers and dogs,
because it's so stickery, and its seeds are hitchhikers.
It has some redeeming qualities as well,
you can make rheumatism tea from the leaves.
Maybe the bears had rheumatism too.
We were always on the lookout for it.
And the bears. But when the words found me,
much to my old boyfriend's chagrin,
he ambled off into the mountain misery,
never to be seen again.

4/20/18

SALT-SEEKING MARMOT, MT. WHITNEY

While we climbed to the summit
of the tallest mountain in the Sierras,

a salt-seeking marmot munched a hole 

right in the middle of my foam mat

stashed in the scree at our base camp.

Sleeping on bare rock that night was no picnic.
My bruised sacrum and hips found no solace
from muller and quern grinding basalt into flour.

I can't imagine the marmot survived the night

after eating that ensolite. Clearly, it tasted
good to him, seasoned with chocolate,
sweat, and the yeast of new love under stars.

I didn't think to cut my holy pad in half 

and marry the two uneaten ends together. 

If only duct tape had been invented, 

if only I'd thought to bring a roll with me. 

But the view from the crest of Mt. Whitney
was a feast for the eyes that nourished
me long after he lost his appetite—
when climbing the tallest mountain
wasn't fodder enough.

8/21/2014

Teaching Notes: Mendocino Woodlands Journal: translations, rainy day women

Mendocino Woodlands, October 6, 1995

Twenty years ago, my first boyfriend, Bob Hamilton turned me towards the bay window of Zachim's Gallery on Main Street, placed nasturtiums and yellow calendula beneath my chin, tilted my rainhat back, turned me towards my reflection in the window, and said, This is how you will look at 40 or 50. We will come back and remember this day.

I couldn't imagine my life without him, for I still believed in love. The gray sea reflected in the window, but his potters thumbs were already molding the clay of my belly. I stood in front of that bay window, and inhaled the punishing odor of nasturtiums in autumn. The sea practiced nuances of turquoise and jade beneath a cloudy sky.

Two decades later, I stand in front of that same bay window and remember what was said, and not said. In the bookstore, I take solace in fingering the book spines in the poetry section, just seeing the names of all my friends in print is comforting. I am homesick, but there is nothing much to return home to.

The other night I told Karin Faulkner I was homesick. I am teaching nearly 200 teenagers from Windsor poetry and silk painting at the Mendocino Woodlands.

Karin's presence, dinner and a beer helped to settle me. The bartender treated us at the pub. Karin and I go out to see Dangerous Minds in Fort Bragg and we are weeping, Do not go gentle. Karin said, We poets are always on the edge of tears.

I understand my students better after the movie, and regain some center by sleeping at her cabin. The last time I slept here in the pygmy forest, years ago, was with Oleg from the Ukraine.

I walk the Mendocino Headlands, no use walking the streets, I have no use for most of what fills the stores. I am not a tourist. I pass the Mendocino Hotel, and remember nights at the bar, where we all gathered after readings and talked about poetry until closing. Sharon Doubiago, Leonard Cirino, Bill Bradd, Jesse River, Devereau Baker, and Tom Robedeaux. Time was more gentle then.

I still want to sip coffee at the Café Beaujolais, but The Loft bookstore, an converted water tower, is now a bakery. Once, at The Loft, Leonard, Tom and I read poems on the crazily tilting floor. Poets are already a bit tilted, so it mattered not.

Leonard Cirino is well represented in the bookstore. I heard Tom Robideaux and Devereaux Baker split up and she went to Texas. Tom, I don't know where he went.

The For Sale sign, another death knell to the past. None of us can afford most of what's's being sold in the shops. As if poetry automatically carried its silent vow of poverty like a prayer flag against the wind. Mendocino's become too rich for most blood. People support new Irish knit sweaters with no patina of age, no shiny cuffs.

Once we lived along this coast like gypsies, sleeping within speaking distance of the ocean. We were part of the migration of artisans that began in the 1960s. The pygmy forest became our bed. Once we came up to help Sasha Makovkin unload his kiln, followed by a wild party of roast goat and vodka toasts as we baptized the new dinnerware fresh from the inferno.

Did that all really happen to me? It's as if memory itself had become fiction. And I could have forgotten all about it, and the sea caves in the middle of the bluff. but I drew a picture of it so I know I was there.

The masculine sea is pounding punishing the earth's vulva. The sheer drop into the sea astounds me. A prophylactic package is wedged in a groove on the fence railing. Why not here? I am envious of someone else's orgasms as if it still lingered in the salt air.


Walking the headlands, a poem is stuck, so alone, so lonely, yet so lovely. A breechbirth. I find myself looking for Sharon Doubiago's blue van, but it's no longer summer, she's headed up the coast.

Already I am rubbing shoulders with memory, the ghost haunting me. My eyes are doing funny things, I can only see the town as it was nearly a quarter of a century ago. The gallery where we once read poetry.

Sharon Doubiago's hair, like golden wings engulfing her face. And how her son, Danny stood there in front of their small cabin, just out of high school about to go off and play football for the Dallas Cowboys that bronze golden-haired manchild, and his slender sister, Shawn standing shyly behind him, deerlike, a carbon copy clone of her mother.

Memory is tricky for it tends to want to tell a story other than its own, and we are left with disembodied images. Ghosts.

And I am remembering the ones who stayed lost, how my childhood friend came here to lick her wounds, and raise a child. She was a friend from when horses came before boys, but later, the drugs took the reins. That all happened before the summer of love. She followed the bands who shaped the substance of a decade.

Karin's voice still seeps in from some of the old readings we gave at the McCallum House. We were the rainy day women: Karin Faulkner, Sharon Doubiago, Robin Rule, Cindy Frank, Mary Norbert Körte, Judith Tannembaum, and Marnie Purple. We were the poets lending our mellifluous voices to the wind.

Hunger gnaws at me but I deny myself food. The full moon is pulling on my blood, ambivalence choking my will. This place of uneasiness unleashes a savage, untamed and wordless poetry. 

Overburdened by memory, I am unable to capture what was said, what was remembered. Everything is always in translation. Even poetry.

Journal entry 10/1/1988 All Saints’ Day dream

Dream journal: Steve Tristano, someone I went to grade school with, I run into him in San Francisco. He’s black, not dead. But he hardly remembers me. I’m getting ready for an event, a wedding, whose? John’s? And I am traveling around California. The ocean. It feels southern like the Bahamas but it’s in California. 

I don’t know why Steve is in my dream, quite frankly I haven’t talked to him since high school, and he was so heavily into drugs it was hard to have a conversation anyway. Steve’s father, Lenny Tristano was a famous jazz musician who invented the boogie-woogie. Steve used to play the boogie-woogie for us when the teacher was out of the room.

Another event. I’m waiting for the shower so I can change into my green skirt and blouse and new silk magenta shirt. But someone is in the bathroom. I thought I was with John in the dream. It seems like Bob’s sister Nancy Hamilton, is in the dream. A judger. It seems my all my old lovers are all blending into one persona. All my past sins.

My clothes are in the back of the car, it’s Bob‘s blue squareback. I’ve gone back in time all right. I gather them up. And then I’m in Forest Knolls again. Somehow I’ve managed to relocate Steve in my dream. But we are on Magnus Street in San Francisco. Magnus is the last name of another boy I once loved, Danny Magnuson. I remember overhearing Steve saying he had to fix his car on Magnus Street. Magnus means the king, it might as well mean the magician. All these cars again. Vehicles how we get from place to place. 

Making a white heart for SSU Art from the Heart show (journal)

White on white, a map of the heart. For the Sonoma State University's Art from the Heart Valentine show, I made a piece of art on Morillo board, a papier-mâché heart on a sheet of paper, a heart cast from paper pulp. I added a section of urchin shell, a spotted guinea fowl's feather, some silk from a dead grandmother's shawl, and fragile coral from the Bahamas.

This is what the viewer sees. What I see: a break up of a seven-year relationship, too many belongings stored under my damp house, an accident, my whiplash, a long slow recovery, and an unusually wet winter – not a passage of time. But flooding stole memory from me.

It took me another seven years to heal before I could confront the loss of my possessions. Negatives without emulsion, glued photographs of random color and shape, this once was Yosemite. This once was a photo of my horse, my cats, me as a child, my friends. Imagine 20 years of documentation of childhood. Gone. My first books, Bambi's Children, books of fairytales illustrated by Arthur Rackham, and Kay Nielsen, The Bobbsey Twins, and The X Bar X boys, an outdoor girls' adventures series, all rotted to pulp.

All my art books. Dali's gold foil candy covered book with drooping watches glued together, now a large rotting laminated piece of cardboard. Janson's History of Art is now a gray pulpy mass. I won't miss that book. Or Mr. Johanson who insisted that we read it cover to cover. He hadn't updated his teaching skills in 50 years.

I mourn for my Encyclopedia of Natural History book with its lists of all the plants and animals of North America, now gone. I spent hours poring over that book as a child. Rereading each section over and over, collecting feathers, fur bits, chipmunk tails (the cats brought in), etc., to augment the hokey illustrations, now barely recognizable. A painful loss. How I loved those books! That one really really shaped my childhood interest in plants and animals.

I saw my very first coatimundi in the Yucatan, which we promptly ran over in our rental car, a rare jungle animal. And we ran over it. Whoops! John said, it was his time. I first learned of coatimundi from that book. The Spanish word is tejón, foes that mean there once were coatis roaming Tejon Pass? Probably not, as it means badger.


My horse's pedigree fell out of the back of the truck as I headed for the dump, taking what was left of my recorded memories of childhood with it. A pamphlet on the US equestrian team, and the Olympics in Mexico City fluttered to the ground.

As a child I fantasized about going to Mexico City. I read up Tenochtitlán and of the canals of Xochimilco, the floating islands. I was going to get there and visit the Museum of Anthropology too. Someday. I was.

Well it finally happened, I did get to Mexico City. You still can see some of the canals and the standing patches of water, but most of the lake bed is filled with cement. The temples have been torn down. I walk on paving stones that once were part of Tenochtitlan. The basilica of the church is made of ancient dressed stone. Tenochtitlán lives in the hidden hearts of stone. The lake lives beneath the city. You can see glimpses of it beneath the sewer grating on the streets. the ancient sure hidden in those cavernous depths.

How can I put all this in that white pulp slurry of a heart? Old art folders, once full of pristine watercolor paper, mildewed and rotted with age. I shredded the rag paper and bleached it . I used the pulp to make valentines of white handmade paper. Who will noticed that there are shreds of fine silk from Bob's grandmother's shawl?

When we got to Oxnard to visit Bob's grandmother, she was so excited that she had a heart attack, and died soon after. We were devastated. I know that Bob's father somehow blamed us for it. He was that kind of man. Hard to believe his mother was so loving. A bon vivant who knew Diego Rivera, and once showed us a mock-up of a mural he was painting.

When Bob left me, the shawl was one of the few things he didn't take with him. Probably because it was rotted at the time, like him, the decay from within. I used it as a beautiful curtain that let the sunlight in but blocked out peering eyes. The cross-sections of pale blue ribbon silk against sheer gauze, and a hand-knotted fringe. Someone said it was a bar mitzvah shaw. Hidden Judaism in the most WASPish of families, there was even a menorah in the closet. Her husband was Dalmatian, and what else? The story is lost forever.

Someone bought the heart at the art auction, I don't know who, I have no photos of it. Somehow it's fitting, since it was made of lost things from the past. Nostalgia tinted with pain of things lost forever, except for a glancing blow in this writing.

Driving to K’san, Skeena River

Driving to Terrace

I admired the rough beauty of the Skeena River and the glacial sweep of the mountains. We were nearing Terrace. There was Old Terrace where the Indians mostly lived, New Terrace, a government project most likely, and there was a lot of empty road between it and 'Ksan, a reconstructed Indian village near Old Hazelton, that Vernon helped to design. Something to do with national pride. The Gitxsan Indian Nation.

Vernon was nothing like the Cherokee man we met in Vancouver who wanted to annihilate all white folks. But he liked us right enough. He wore a breastplate made of bones in the Cherokee style. Bones that reminded me of the delicate bone of my forearm. Paranoid, I told myself.

Vernon Stephens was driving down the Yellowhead at 110 mph in an old 60s pickup truck. Our packs were in danger of flying out the back of the truck. But I trusted Vernon implicitly. He picked us up in Prince Rupert. Liked our foolhardiness. "Anyone nuts enough to try to hitch out of that place deserves a ride," he said.

I had briefly met Vernon years before in front of the de Young museum (or was it the UBC?) I once spent an afternoon watching him carve a totem pole in the old way. I never expected to run into him again in Prince Rupert, of all places.

Vernon's hair was the most beautiful wavy black cloud I had ever seen. Bob's hair was long, and curly, California style, but he always wore his hair tied back in a knot, like he was secretly embarrassed by it all, and only grew long to be defiant after he got out of the army.

Vernon wore his hair like a bride's veil and he walked with the comfort of the man in touch with his body, his energy directed from his hips led him forward with grace and ease. Bob was head oriented. Like there was this string attached to the top of his head, lifting him up every time he stepped forward. Not of the earth. But then, that was Bob's way.

I'd been with Bob for so long, I'd gotten used to his ways. I'd forgotten about them, actually. Vernon made me aware of it. Made me turn over in my subconscious. Took me two years to realize it. Bob made me unhappy and I didn't even know it.

We stopped off to have a beer in Smithers. Vernon knew everybody there—there wasn't enough room for another chair at our table. "Can I buy you another round?" another face asked. I couldn't even place the name with the face, there were so many buyers.

I noticed that I was the only woman drinking in the bar. This was truly a man’s world. I was gatecrashing.Again. I asked, "So, don't women drink beer around here?" No one answered. The waitress was the only other woman I had seen since leaving Prince Rupert. Rosie was her name. Vernon said she was a great gal. He knew her well. I think. It made me a little envious.

Amazing to watch this man who had the profound respect of all these white folks. Not like the ones who hurled slurs at Indians in other towns. Not like the drunks sleeping it off below Pike Street in Seattle.

Vernon is a goldsmith. A well-known goldsmith. Most everyone around here is wearing one of the chased wristbands he makes for the Provincial Museum in Victoria, and other tourist shops. One of those bands costs more than what Bob and I have to live on for the entire summer.

Vernon takes off his cuff to show us how he makes it convex. I dabble in silver and show him my turquoise rings. I can tell that he is not impressed which makes me sit up a bit, as I'm pretty good at it, but I have no intention of becoming a jeweler, and he knows it.

The beer keeps coming. Soon, I'm slithering under the table, and they all have a good laugh. "She can can't even hold her beer," Vernon says smugly. I feel the implied dig and I slur, "I'm Irish. 100% Irish. We feel it sooner. It's this Canadian beer, it's stronger than our American beer." He laughs.

"Yeah, that’s real piss beer," someone offers. I retort, "Hey, listen, you got to account from my relative size. I am a lot smaller than you guys." And then I pretty much fall into a heap on the floor. Vernon takes my unfinished beer and drains it down. Lifts me up. Says, "Well, we gonna hit the ground. I got to get to Terrace. Thanks. Be seeing you."

Vernon pulled the battered truck into the only gas station in town. It took us two tanks of gas to drive from Prince Rupert to Terrace. We paid for gas. Least we could do. Nothing is close these parts. To go to the nearest bar, you have to drive 40 miles or so. No alcohol on Indian reservations.

Soon we have to take a break, return all that rented beer. There's so little traffic in these parts, the two men just stand there jawing on the side of the road at dusk. Male bonding in action. Twin rivulets track across the road and head down to the Skeena River. My beer frothed into a little well of sacred earth by the side of the road, making me realize, that despite the company, I was very much alone. In retrospect, I should’ve folded my bad hand, and run off with Vernon. But it was not in the cards.

typed 3/1979

SKEENA RIVER

Skeena River and vast glacial mountains
We drink from a pure stream along the way.

Why did Vernon say he hated the river?
Whey did it ever do to him?

Halfway to Terrace we stopped off for a beer

Soon the table was crowded with Indians
and two gringo hitchhikers.

After several rounds, I slid under the table
and all the men laughed because
a woman couldn't hold her beer.
We returned the rented beer to the river.

I’ve backpacked through British Columbia
and slept wherever it suited me.
But in Vancouver there was nowhere to stay.

So we slept in the shrubbery
at the University of British Columbia

and under a tree in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria
only to be awakened by an aphid rainstorm
and to a young man waking the swans with his flute.

And after a hangover from the Beaver Pub
we slept in the shadow of the lofty Empress Hotel.
In Stanley Park where we watched the ships in the Straits.

At Jasper, deep in the Rockies, We slept in a hotel lobby
with other travelers of the thumb

And we snuck into the showers upstairs.
Ah, such heaven.

On the reservation

she was young and big and brown
and seemed so much younger than I.

She looked forward to the day
when she could join the RCMP Academy.
She said her grades were good.

I looked at her in disbelief
and thought to myself, ah well,
one can be miserable in the midst of splendor
but it still is a kind of hell for her.

I have traveled so far to see her hell.
I camped by the Skeena River
in the bushes that night
and I got sick from the water.
Another hind of hell.

3/79