Sonoma Valley Poetry Festival, Sunnyside cafe, July -Aug

Letter to David Fisher

Tonight, largest full moon of the century, a blue moon. High spring tides earthquakes predicted, California slipping off. You wrote, I am the crab's utensils raised in the sea. . .

I bought blueberries from Oregon & tiger prawns from Southeast Asia— their nacreous color more than skin-deep: stripes of blue and yellow with markings of gold.

I remember one full moon night in a stranger's house, my throat swelled, wind whistling from the north, Ioanna Veronika sitting up with me, talking of Poland, her father’s tattoos. Ausweicz. Waiting for the vigil of pills to work, my memory flickered across the cornea at the speed of light.

Maybe it was poison spray on the blueberries, or Agent Orange. My adrenaline needle locked safely in the Volkswagen (Delft blue like the clams lining the streets of Holland).

Your young child who drowned in the pond; did his short life brush past in such extravagant detail, the artists were jealous? Relative age has to do with selective memory; crib notes replace specific details only the young are capable of noticing—their senses not yet jaded.

Groggy on benedryl, I sat in the hospital bed typing—furious words burned across the page, the poem wasn't finished with me. But the platen stuck; thick carbon banded the bottom of the page, I was no more enlightened than before.

As I defrocked the tiger prawns, the Mekong Delta came to mind: a place I've never been. Once I was too young, & I thought the explosions in the coastal hills at night were bombs dropping in Vietnam, (not poachers).

This age of innocence, the spawning ground for poetry took decades to manifest through the transcendence of mute speech (call it philosophy).

Blame it on destiny, or dyslexia.

I was a painter: everything in terms of shape and color—poetry is a conscious act. I think of you running through the indigo streets of America, naked as a jaybird, screaming, Stop the war! Any war, it didn’t matter.

There are worse nightmares: military commanders who don’t dream.

Tiger prawns in the river deltas of Southeast Asia feed upon the dead; what generation passed before my lips, roseated dawn baptized in garlic and oil. The fire purified them into the acceptable pink reserved for shrimp. Crimson dawn flushed in the pan.

I was sorry to see that lovely blue disappear into the void, as if the speechless sky swallowed its own tongue. I wanted to paint those prawn tails so like wings of blue dragonflies weaving and stitching the basket lakes of the Sierras.

Today, I took your poems, Teachings, into my poetry classes. My students, the bruised survivors of the domestic battlefields: the suicidal girl who jumped in the river in front of her classmates; the one who passed out under the bridge; the boys who touched her; the others watching.

The structure of the poem was a raft to carry us across the River Styx. It tended us like the good doctor's chickens beside the red wheelbarrow.

You said, Write me a sonnet to the color blue; I cannot find my way to the borderlines of a sentence; these thin boundaries by which we live.

Asleep at the stern, the remains of honeyed oatcakes on his lips,
Charon was well paid for his time.



© Maureen Hurley 3/4 - 3/8/93 & 2/26/94

RRWG reading Burbank Activity Center with David Fisher, Maureen Hurley

Broadside: Homage to Ken Poff, by David Fisher

April is the cruelest month. A broadside found in Donna Champion’s copy of Boschka Layton’s book, Prodigal Son, published in 1982. So, I suspect we were having a memorial reading for Boschka at the Russian River Writers’ Guild or perhaps a memorial at Paul Mariah’s place in Sonoma—some time in April of 1984, and David Fisher must’ve showed up to read as well. Hence the broadside in her book, marking the title poem of the book. Manroot Press’s Love Poems: Homage to Houseman by Samuel M Steward. So, though I found this in 2018, on somewhat of a pilgrimage of remembrance, I’m posting it on the date of Ken’s death. I remember Ken as a slight, grey sort of man. Dear friend and lover of Paul Mariah. And Paul’s guilt, of course. And the certainty he lived with that he too would follow Ken, so every day he survived the dread disease was filled with grace and guilt. Those who survived the longest shouldered that burden of grief unto the next decade. Or century. I'm not sure when Ken died, but he was still alive and kicking at Helen Luster's memorial in March ofo 1985. His big, beautiful grin shedding light.

Ironically, Paul didn't contract AIDS, He refused to get tested for years, but died of pneumonia in January 1996.




Posted 10/24/18




See Letter to David Fisher