Wupatki (photos)

As I revisited Wupatki Monument, I discovered it was built by the Kayenta Anasazi! Small world. I am still traveling within the culture. Last time I was here was with Celia Woloch in 1992. So it's a homecoming back to the self.

My friend Erik said the culture's "a mixture of SinAgua, Kyenta Anasazi and Cohonina peoples. The northernmost ceremonial ball courts, like Mexico, suggest contact with the Hohokam. Some may have become the Havasupai. 

 Others became Hopi clans. The Bear, Katsina, Lizard, Rattlesnake, Sand, Snow, and Water clans go there to remember their ancestors. There is a blow hole there which probably had sacred meaning. They grew corn and squash, harvested water and traded stuff all the way from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico and Mexico."

I put my hat over the blowhole below the ball court and let it shoot up into the air. It smells of dankness and limestone and death. The sacred Quiché Maya twins Hunahpu and Hunahpu (or Xbalanque) played ball here too. In the caves of Xibalba, the Lord of the Underworld sighs.

Suddenly I am remembering, and missing John Oliver Simon, who took me to the underbelly of the world, and I am once again straddling parallel lives. Both coming and going. Time telescoping into itself like a Möbius strip. The jaguar sun fell from the sky, pierced to the heart by an arrow. I am counting katuns and facing the end of another relationship. Off with their heads. Let the games begin.

from Facebook notes, revised 4/23/16

Choose Three Famous People

Molly Fisk asked on Facebook: Name three famous people you'e known.

Mine would be a litany too long to post. How do I choose just three?

Then there's "what kind of famous?" Do I choose from writers, poets, actors, musicians, public figures, etc.? By how well I knew them—an actual event vs. a one-off? 

Writers: I shared a wee drop of whiskey with Seamus Heaney in an elevator in Rotterdam with the African poets. Rita Dove was my partner in the Breyton Breytenbach translation sessions. We did not drink whiskey.

I went drinking and sang Irish songs with Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver at the Port Townsend Tavern in Washington. Let's just say alcohol was consumed and I was a lightweight. They weren't.

I hung out with Maya Angelou and her son Guy at National Poetry Week. We sat backstage with Lucille Clifton waiting for Maya to come offstage. They talked about the gravitational speed of their breasts reaching to their waists.

Sylvia Tota

A chance encounter with a stranger on a Vienna-bound Budapest train that I nearly missed, some two decades ago— literally landed me in the lap of a rather irate Hungarian lady. She was disgruntled. I had nearly fallen off the moving train, I had enough adrenalin to lift an elephant so we got off to a rocky start.

Sylvia Tota was returning home to Miami after a fruitless attempt to get two novels published, "Sárga Nárcisz," and "Különös Karnevál," by a famous Hungarian writer, Fedor Ágnes—a challenge as Jewish Holocaust writing was banned in Hungary for so long.

Sylvia told me harrowing stories of her escape from Hungary that made the hairs on my arms stand straight as soldiers. She was a literary agent—and friend of Isaac Bashievs Singer. I was on my way to Russia to marry a pop singer—who loved God more than me. She advised, No. Marriage is a business arrangement.

Then she rescinded once she saw the photo of Valera. She said If I waited I'd rationalize, and spoil it. It took a long while for her yenta advice to settle in—at the eleventh hour as I was about to board that final train from Amsterdam to Helsinki and Moscow. I never got a chance to tell her how it all came out.

We had become fast friends on that fateful train ride, she roundly kissed my goodbye on both cheeks—I felt as if I'd been adopted — and she pressed her address and phone number into my hands and admonished me to call her if I ever was in Miami. I never did. Guilt follows me.

I'm a terrible letter writer—not that I'm a terrible writer—it's just that I write many letters in my head. Some make it to paper—few ever get mailed. So email and the internet's been a godsend for keeping in touch. But in 1991 there was no internet—no email. Faxes were cutting edge technology.

I transcribed one of those letters I never sent—to my friend, poet, Celia Woloch—a piece about Sylvia Tota, called Budapest Nights. I later tried to find Sylvia on the internet as I had long since lost her contact information. I've been to Miami three times since then and still haven't kept my promise. But I think of her often.

When I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, it was as if Sylvia was by my side—a tour guide in spirit. Maybe it's because I had told her of working with Joe Rapoport and The Holocaust Oral History Project in Sonoma County, CA ("Joe Rapoport, The Life of a Jewish Radical", Temple University Press, 1981.) My friend, the late Marianne Ware, self-professed red-diaper baby, was instrumental in educating me. Whatever the connection, it all coalesced, and became part of my zeitgeist.

I'm quite active on Facebook—it's a great place for writers to keep in touch. I have my own private page and another open to the public "fan" page. Imagine my surprise when I found a note from Sylvia's daughter on my fan page.

Hi Maureen, you don't know me personally but you did meet my mother Sylvia Tota, on the way to Vienna on a train from Budapest! I just read your blog "Budapest Nights" and tears were down my face… Please link to me on facebook so we can chat! Regards.

A flurry of emails ensued and now we're connected and now I have her phone number. I guess Sylvia didn't want us to lose touch after all. I can't wait to find out the backstory. Did anyone ever record Sylvia's story?

Another how many degrees of separation gift from Facebook. The other one was long lost distant cousins from continents apart, finding me out of the blue. But that's another story I'm not ready to write.

To read the original story:
Budapest Nights

Journal fragments Travel re-entry is never easy.

Letters to Celia Woloch

c/o Vins van Neerven, 

Hogerbeetsstraat 97 III, 

1052 VV Amsterdam, Netherlands 

   
Celia, my grlfrnd—                 Aug. Sept., 1992-93?

In the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. —Omni

AUG 20—Even in between sobs, it’s good to hear your voice via the Ma Belle satellite. And yes, I’m not writing much, lacking the focus. Where are the poems hidden? Why won’t they come?

Maybe this letter will open up the dam (Amster-dam: the 16th c. dam on the Amsterele river is real, not a metaphor. I’ve given into the timelessness of being at loose ends—with no agendas, hidden or otherwise—in a country not my own, seeking what oddities life has to offer.)

Where do poems come from? Page One of my notebook documents the oddities of The Final Frontier: After fighting nearly three years with Soviet bureaucracy for permission to hook up a computer telecommunications system with the Ukraine for a cultural exchange program, I finally let go of the idea. 

Then, shortly after April Fool’s Day, I received my first E-mail message from Oleg via GlasNET. Was it incongruous to read a satellite message transmitted half-way around the world that began with: “Cosmonaut lands, doesn’t recognize his own country?” 

Ex-lovers aside, how ironic: my first message from the new independent nation, Ukraine, is not about freedom, but about space, the final frontier. O-oh K.!?

Yes. Forgotten during the 1991 August coup, stranded Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev helplessly watched his country disappear: changing its name, anthem, and political order. The abandoned space program was officially broke with no way to get him home. 

Secret calls in the night; someone trying to sell Soviet space ships for hard currency. When Krikalev eventually returned to Earth after ten months in space, he didn’t recognize his own country. It was then discovered in the weightlessness of space, an astronaut’s heart shrinks. 

Moral: be careful of hasty conclusions and hearts stranded in space. Complex metaphor swiftly approaching from the starboard side. Will I regret not going to Russia after the Fall, and seeing for myself, the changes?

Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's 1/9/2005

Celia opens her reading at Cody's Bookstore, as an homage to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country. She read a poem called Late, she says she undressing the idea of choosing to be lovely by wearing an earring as a talisman.

She reads a pantoum about being bareback and how the woods were on fire we rode towards the flame with the sky and our mouths close to that danger, a list poem. She read My Mother's Birds. Sucha was a nickname, she raised chickens. Chocka was the sound of chickens and also the sound of the ax falling. She said, We could escape unlike the chickens.

Blink a child's tattered self-image: being called wool-lock, chink-eye, Saint Cecilia, here is how the world turns on itself, a girl...

Apres la Luna Miel, a love poem the, moon of honey, the sky of milk. Naming the hypothetical children and escaping from them. She does a play on slow children at play, a dyslexic moment, something I know too well. 

Another poem The Passionate Suitcase, for her Gypsy sisters. I believe the moon blink, the traffic of leaving then the night slams shut. Don't look back.

She reads from Tsigani, a book-length poem. My friend Ken Bullock and Celia took another epic Budapest train ride, which led to the poem I knew snippets of the story, then I hear the Gypsy history interpliced. The what if poem… what if I had no documents, no country… While waking into the dream of Budapest, my name in his throat like a jewel. 

Dien dobre, Polish for good morning. Celia told a story of how she was robbed, no passport. Someone said something about selling her to the gypsies, with no proof of country. I had grown thin on a diet of grief, consonants lost between languages. The neighbor, worn as a blade, eggs in his hands. Djen—day: eat what is offered in that light.

Proposals: Happy Independence Day another list poem. I don't know who'd who they think I am dressed in rags of wind with eyes of green fire.

Doren Robins says there's a tenuousness in Celia's poetry. Segue to Sholeh Wolpe, born in Persia, who said who said 10% of the people will never kill, 10% will always kill, the rest of us who will go either way. Then a reference to Hotel Rwanda, the idea of distancing oneself from the current governments of the oppressive. What one man will do to another. 

The Persian culture is now flourishing. But women get the raw end of the deal. They serve men. Condoleezza Rice is a two-man army on her own. In their writing and art they continue to serve men. Bomblets, not leisure, but sperm. Muslim fighters are given a key to heaven to paradise. The idea of the virgin paradise is sewn into his father's pants. Words have no need for light, they shine on their own. 

Afterwards we all go out for a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant and talk until the restaurant closes. The foggy night tightens its prison issue blanket about our shoulders.

CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

CHRISTMAS LETTER FROM POLAND

                      Love is a drowning in flood waters

                        —Irish anon., 9th C. 

                                           to Richard Benesivitch

1. A friend I thought afraid of commitment,

writes he married the girl next door

twice: a civil wedding and a church one,

as if the first one didn’t quite take—

Soviet-style bureaucracy still applies.

He sends photos of a post-industrial Walbrzych

where happiness is possible because the mines have closed.

Richard’s letter smells of cheap tobacco and coal smoke.

Lonesome for California, he sits at a Hard Rock cafe in Wroclaw.

Sends translations and poems in an adopted tongue—

his Polish is improving; confesses Lithuanian is his first love.

From the look of his letter, I’d say he’s losing his English.

Tak! I thought of Czeslaw Milosz’s lament:

I did not choose California, it was given to me. . .

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,

So that what is stone in me could be dissolved. . .

I write here in desolation.

2. Another friend searches for ancestors in winter;

only the City of Light offered refuge

from the darkness of Prague and Krakow.

She writes about growing up hunkie,

the silent steel mills of Pittsburgh

where her barrelchested father first worked,

then later, as a mechanic in the hangars,

but he never flew the blue distance of sky to homeland.

Before his stroke, we spoke a rough English

peppered with Polish and Ukrainian.

Now it’s too late to translate secrets trapped in his eyes.

A slagheap of words slide down the slopes of despair.

3. We never finish poems, they abandon us.

Or is it the other way around?

New Year’s rain fell in biblical proportions

as if the sky knelt down by the river, opened a vein.

My blood thinned after my father’s death one Christmas,

within a year my mother, then my uncle followed. . .

I just went down, down, down.

Little in the way of poetry surfaced,

I became stone, no coming up for air

as if grief were a river to drown in.

I learned to crawl,

suffered a purgatorial floundering

in the baptismal font called California.

Zgoda, zgoda—peace flooding the roads.

The beginnings of a poem roils and fights for breath,

a steelhead flexing on a thin line, escapes

so that what is stone in me may be absolved. . .

1/23/97 Moon in Leo

Presidents' Day weekend

Monday, Presidents' Day weekend, I'm in the city, staying at Jill Singer's flat with Celia Woloch and Ken Bullock. Saturday night we ate at Café Albona, one of my favorite North Beach restaurants, and last night we ate at Anchor Wat. We were ostensibly celebrating previous birthdays and missed holidays as well. I don't know if I can afford any more overlooked holidays.

Last time we ate at Café Albona was three years ago, all three of us. It was interesting to see that Celia and Ken had formed a friendship over the years that did not include me, or need me to bridge the gap—as it often is with friends and friends. They shared some wild times traveling in Eastern Europe, and they now share friends in common, whom I know only of by hearsay, or poetry. And so it goes. But I feel a little left out in the cold.

Jill is almost in the same friend category, she is a friend of Celia's, and is fast becoming a friend of ours, or Ken's, except we haven't all quite clicked yet. The enemy of your enemy is my friend sort of thing. But she's posh English so I keep my distance.

Yesterday after seeing the play, Twilight, about the LA riots, a monologue, we went to the San Francisco airport to pick Jill up from her London flight which was delayed 2 1/2 hours due to bomb scares and engine troubles. So we spent the time in the airport hotel lounge nursing bright red wine through the afternoon and evening talking of war.

Meanwhile, in Israel, they have planted trees for the man who smuggled the Chagal paintings out of Russia.

POSTCARDS FROM THE ROAD, REDUX

POSTCARDS FROM THE ROAD, REDUX

Dear Jim,

Wending our way cross-country with laptops, sleeping bags,

evening dresses, broken hearts, hiking boots, Celia & I

managed to find the North Rim in the dark without a map.

Woke to your cowboy coffee, colon-blo, boiled french roast

that threatened to make off with the pot at Jacob Lake

which we never did find. Lake was a man, not a body of water.

Soon as we crossed the Utah border, Lord, how we suffered

from Mormon exposure, twisting our vowels (not bowels).

She insisted the sign at Dry Beaver Creek read

“Keep poets on leash/ or face fine.” We haven’t written a thing,

but could use a two-bit shower & a shave.

Dear Sharon,

We drive along the Virgin River, the towns of Virgin,

and Laverkin by the Cowboy Buttes in Beaver County—

& wonder, what was on those Mormon’s minds.

Celia calls me Mo-reen, says we’re in ’Merika now

but is confused by my speaking in tongues:

the ungulates crossing the road are cantaloupes. 

Oh give me a home…

Can you spell dicks-lexia, bulls and girls?

We’re born again, baptized in the Virgin River

(don’t know as to whether or not it actually took),

I say she baptized us in the wrong place: the difference

between dyslexia and dailysex is merely a perceptual matter.

Where does the the random mind stop and the prairie begin?

Dear Bruce,

Crossing the Sandia Mountains

I kain’t believe how much “Jesus saves” ’round here—

Or how on our 1993 White Trash Tour,

which officially began at the Cadillac Ranch

(a line of caddies planted nose first—car henge)

in Amarillo, Texas, folks take three syllables

(or all day, whatever comes first) to say fish and truck.

The trucks here are God’s personal rollin’ billboards

& the overpasses tell us poor watermelons to believe. 

God is dog; evil is live. Shone’s is one-up from Stuckey’s.

We’ve been on the road too long; Denny’s is beginning to seem like home.

We’re road worriers sinnin’ in the heart of the cholesterol belt,

getting good mileage on bad vowels and day-old puns.

Dear God,

El Reno, the epicenter of radio revival land is a shakin’ & a rollin’

but the cockroaches in the motel bathroom don’t seem very saved.

However, I do believe they will inherit the earth, by and bye.

Blanketed by kudzu vines, black-eyed susans suffer death by bed tax.

We’re humid beans descending into the syntax of the vegetable kingdom.

Like true love, and the blues, maps are abstract unless you’ve been there.

You’d like Hot Springs, home of Bill Clinton haircuts & the Sin Tax.

I bet the Mormons took to that idea. Say, God, who's your best friend?

Lightning storm—we pilgrims cross Old Muddy, enter Memphis,

& truly we have let Tennessee into our hearts, for at the gates

of Graceland, the chosen have come to testify the miracles.

St. Elvis is still King, and anything is possible—this poem, or even love.

9/23/93  Graceland

T’SIGE, MONUMENT VALLEY

A flock of sheep

like smoke floods the road.

Dressed in red banners, corn mothers

dance in furrows. Clapton sings the blues

to the passing blur of fields.

Trying to press onto Shiprock by sunset,

we enter into twilight, equinox.

Sabitaie, the rock with wings,

the great bird that brought the Navajo

from the north, unfolds and emerges,

a Pliocene knife to the eye of the sky.

The earth’s shadow, a blue eclipse

below the belly of a salmon horizon.

We are no closer to knowing who we are,

than to where we were.

9/22/93 
Tsé Bitʼaʼí, Four Corners
New Mexico

VERMILION CASTLE

VERMILION CASTLE

At Bowery Creek, the cottonwoods

undress themselves for the fall,

maples combust against

Navajo sandstone so red,

it makes the deer seem green.

Down from the summer pastures,

the Herefords part around the car

like the Red Sea. The cowboy tips his hat,

says his smile will break my camera.

Lariat ready for strays, he whistles

to the cattle milling at the stop sign.

A redtail hawk hovers above us,

vermilion spires pierce the sky.

Quaking aspens whisper sunlight

to the patches of first snow

and I am far from home.

9/21/93  Utah

PETROGLYPHS TO THE SUN, PAROWAN GAP

PETROGLYPHS TO THE SUN, PAROWAN GAP

The snake seeks the sun

crawling to the sky, a ladder

for the small spider gods

and the continuation of day.

Equinox. Sun and moon

and the trail to the sky is open

to the orbital continuation of days.

Amid the debris of the 20th century,

I am looking for the symmetry of worked stone,

finding only crystalline structures

in the desert varnish, the exposed marble,

the crushed hearts of riverstones,

and other signs of ancient oceans.

What of those concentric circles

with an upraised hand?

The beseeching of water, the labyrinth?

Is it the snake or lightning

that climbs up the rocks to the sky?

Hands at the end of the path to guide us—

At the four corners, an intersection.

The division of power—a circle and a cross.

At least the wind knows its own strength.

We are gathering rocks for those who will follow

the small hidden selves—

I am looking for symptoms of earlier cultures

than the amber glass, cans & cigarette butts

that will survive us.

9/21/93 Parowan Gap, Utah

1994 Steelhead Special

MYTHICS

MYTHICS

Dendridic clouds, juniper, yarrow & aster.

Yesterday’s pronghorn and road signs glow

amber and red as if lit from within.

Turquoise and jade greet the sunset—

I gather cedar and sage for smudge sticks.

The power lines, ancient symbols of man

carry electricity west. Equinox.

We are eclipsed by technology,

and the urgency of fall light.

Amid the rows of new-mown alfalfa

a tumbleweed gallops to the horizon.

We talk of horses, Sinead O’Connor sings,

England’s not the mythical land 

of Madam Georgian roses…

We pass a hogan—earth household.

A meadowlark collides with the car,

death on the wing, by the roadside,

wild cotton, bluebirds weaving the air.

9/21/93  Parowan Gap, Utah

CROSSING THE SHOSHONES

CROSSING THE SHOSHONES

On Highway 50, said to be

the loneliest road in America,

the eyes of a coyote gleam in our headlights.

I am caught up in the web of history:

who I am, where I come from.

We climb up into Austin

crossing the Reese River,

the road to Home Ranch.

Who’d have thought this desolate valley

would harbor a child

who would work on the bomb?

We pull into the Pony Canyon motel,

fragments jogged from memory

loosened like milk teeth,

or rocks after the thaw.

9/18/93  Austin, Nevada

BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

(Or why I didn't go to Russia to marry the singer)

                                    —from paintings by Kandinsky

The birds sing a blue tic-tac-toe with the moon

and ideals carve themselves into oars

to row us across the crest of the 20th century.

Myth and language are buried

in the algebraic equation of the sun,

and the artist's palette. Private symbols explode,

sawhetting across the industrial calligraphy of the sky.

Einstein was right: gravity bends light.

All this deliberation on the natural state

and the shadow of our eventual death

feeds my guilt; I am trapped into accepting

the evolution of air, the shifting of time,

grace notes on the telephone wires,

the piano's thoughts colliding with dust motes—

The hunger of a dream waking

a contextual tableau we punctuated

with molecular definitions

and artificial boundaries

between nations, peoples, lovers.

But I tire of explaining how the open-

armed lover on the Street of Painters  waits with shackles.

When the storyline gets tangled in barbed wire,

the politic wind merely teases it into shape;

it knows no boundaries, no border guards maintaining order

by calling it love, or sings arias til death do us part.

xox       is how the game is played out       

xxo            with illiterate kisses and hugs on ransom notes

xy                    so that chromosomes may evenly divide.

Blue segment, white center:

a flock of birds painted on the channel wall,

suspended flight across the water.

In the muddied clarity between shoreline

and hidden river, distant ships trick the eye

into believing they navigate the land too—

their masts, thin reeds in the autumn wind.

Sinking its teeth upon a reflection

of the moon, how easily the swamp

is placated by its own origin,

its own death.

8/20/92

Schiphol, Amsterdam

Journal entry, 4/4/92, Venice boardwalk

4/4/92, Celia and I walk along the Venice boardwalk after dark talking of violence, how danger arrives in the lives of innocent bystanders in the form of stray bullets, come along home little eagles. A memory from the past, I was 10, walking along that same dark alley with a friend wanting money. For two bits I was molested by an old man in a seedy abandoned hotel room but I’d forgotten all this. Only now as I walk along the stained ribbon, that last wall that divides the strand from terra firma, it all comes back as Celia warned me of stray bullets.

I realize a random act can be no less violent than my own childhood, here along these canals where I ran with the pack. I thought I had no LA poems in me, but the city of Angels and the canals have witnessed a multitude of sins, passages. Mine is one more sexual stroke swelling the purgatory of sinners, the collective unconscious. I didn’t feel betrayed by the man, but by the girl who led me there. I refused to play with her again. I chose to be lonely and alone rather than face that betrayal again.

I write this missive in transito. On the plane. In first class, a man yells, and yells again. I am so scared. The word oxygen is bantered about. We are a temporary audience in bad Hollywood fashion. One summer I lived on a hill across from those big white letters. I guess everyone’s got to write their LA poem, al la Bukowski just like everyone’s got their own baby Bukowski story to tell as well.

But I should, yes, two angels, with smooth pubescence, no betrayal of sex, they are asexual angels who will never know the thrill of a mouth on nipple, clitoris rising in the most holy moments. Do they dream?

And when we bring in the wash, in the sheets, we uncover the pale beginnings of the origins of love. How impeccable white takes on the dolor of the sky As a child I never understood why the sky beneath the eucalyptus took on the greyness of lead.

The plane pulls back from the loading dock. A man leaves, a cop enters, another man leaves and everyone is growing an extra vertebrae in their necks, trying to piece together the story, any one will do, as long as it’s plausible. I guess that’s the way it was with us. Happiness was plausible, therefore we were plausible. After all, you were a Rhodes Scholar,  John. You should know, Greek letters trailing you like ropes from Baja to the Andes.

No I don’t regret those poems lying next to me in a book, years later, it’s just the shock of it. And yes we were happy, if just for an instant on that beach in the port of Angels so much further south of the border. Who was to know that when we murdered our unborn son, we were accomplices to the murder of love.

Yes. Those jaded eyes will come back to haunt us through stinging arrows—words pierce the transparent air and find their target, years after conception, while we kiss the lips of strangers, and begin anew for the umpteenth time, but isn’t this the American way?

And so in the city of Angels, I visited you again and again, my lover, entonces, always to the shores of Mexico, where you would shed your gringo skin, but never your eyes – all that green and blue settling in the cenote as you sleep in El Convento where DH Lawrence signed the register, where he resurrected the Plumed Serpent into English palabras.

At the Sculpture Gardens, the other writers and I exchanged pleasantries in Español. I read my poems for the waiters at the garden, not for the well powdered, more than middle-aged audience. I see the ones standing by the door listening so intently. I’m sure the words have wings fluttering, las almas, into the soul of the afternoon where sunlight takes its own choosing, the hour of reckoning.

Last night we set the clocks ahead in order to trick ourselves into thinking there was an extra hour in the day, but like with everything in the city, as with these word, it’s an illusion. White against white equals white. My skin is an intermediate step between the tongue of racial tolerance. No longer am I the white whore because I speak in tongues. The bus boy says, I wish to write poetry. I encourage him in both languages. The language of grief cannot hide the truth and why I am alone, Poetry, my inheritor, mi amor.

HOTEL LA FONDA, TAOS

HOTEL LA FONDA, TAOS

At the Hotel La Fonda where rest pieces of the famous—
Rudolph Valentino's cape, Emilio Zapata's shoes—
we palmed worn dollar billsto the night clerk behind the counter.
His oxygen mask hose was long enough
to reach the inner sanctum of the owner, Saki Karavas,
where the banned paintings of D.H. Lawrence
are carefully locked away from the public eye.
He hissed, Take your time.

Inside the ornate gilded cage of the walk-in safe 

we confronted biting and sucking fleshy apparitions.
I said to Celia: D.H. could've used some anatomy classes.
but that's not what held us spellbound;
it was the photos: Pope Paul, Kennedy, Picasso, O'Keeffe.
And of those more obscene than Lawrence:
Roosevelt, Truman, Oppenheimer, Nixon before the camera.
And of the ones shaken of faith: April 2, 1943.

Stunned by what he now knows is possible,
Einstein writes to his host, Saki
thanking him for his translations of Greek poetry:
I am grateful and ashamed at the same time
by your extraordinary kindness…
I cannot imagine how I would feel…
it is enough to see what kind of human
ideal you have in your mind.

The walls hissed: July 16, August 6, August 9, 1945.

Shiva will dance on the corneas of Einstein and Oppenheimer.
Shiva will dance for the millions dead on both sides of the world.
Shiva will dance for the Age of Light spawned in this desert.

No one thought to censor the scientists of Los Alamos
nor the Anasazi petroglyphs at T'sanque: (Tsirege or T’sankawi?)
Kokopelli, the humpback Watersprinkler
holds a phallus longer than his bent flute.

Saki enters, his hooded eyes watch our guilty reaction.
We say we are poets. Smiling heavily, he says:

These two ladies don't pay, give back their money . 

We help Saki move musty stacks of books.
Feeding us sweets, he asks why I've never married.
I tell him: Because I have learned the names of bombs.

Saki wants to trade his D.H. Lawrence paintings
for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece
but the British aren't interested in returning stolen property. 

Let alone, the banned paintings by D.H. Lawrence.   
Against the wall, in proper patron tradition,
the husks of his shoes are neatly lined up with nowhere to go.

The Watersprinkler plays his flute—

a slow dirge hissing to the pornographers and thieves of time.
Who will trade all that light loosened in the sky
for the darkness that inevitably follows.

9/22/90

Hotel La Fonda, Taos, New Mexico
Fall Equinox

BETWEEN THE LINES

BETWEEN THE LINES

                                    —for Jim Dodge

As the blind kitten named Lassie teeths on my toes,

we talk of finding our way home

            to the end of a sentence

and of conjunctions; however, at a loss for words,

our conversation meanders like the perverse bed

of a slow stream oxbowing in and out of itself.

We admire faded pink bachelor buttons

and exposed bulbs flushed from the flowerbed,

studying the hidden patterns of nature

& the inquisition of awkward first-person

perspectives buried in the plot

            of sub-text and context.

Again he asks, Do you still believe in love?

I say I don't regret the falling in love part,

just the endings are harder to erase.

As I turn to leave, my face aches

like the skull grinning on his t-shirt.

He adds, Poetry is on its deathbed in America,

I'm no guru when it comes to love either.

Warns me to tell the truth when I write,

Love over gold—as if it were an option.

The nervous heat searing the air

into shimmering ropes of light,

ripples the afternoon like a pond.

7/13/90