HEALING WAYS freewrite

For those who will follow.
        —for Al Hunter

I wanted the edge of the equator

where the scent of eucalyptus

tangles the continents

I fell hard against the sun

on the streets of Quito

on the street of the upright coffins

I wanted to find a dancing partner

I wanted to find life

edged in the purple satin of the dead

I could see their faces smiling at me

following me into my dreams

When I saw the eyes of the unborn

I was separated from myself

though the rainbows chased us to Otovalo.

My grandmother follows me even in sleep

in the underbelly of this continent

She refuses to speak but asks for

the camera lens of my eye

to record the tarnished silver of the heart

my beating heart with clipped wings

in the cage I was born into.

I dream of lizards in the woodpile

against the coming of winter

the circular haunting of life.

I cannot write of my father

whose solitary confinement

followed him even in death

raising his jar of whiskey against the darkness.

I gestate my terms of mourning

give birth to lizards and geckos

who died the day after his birth

I walk the streets of the Mission

like a bloodhound in search of unnamed quarry

of my absent father, hungry for memory

anyone’s memory

a mirror against my own emptiness

that I couldn’t foresee

the circle of the cup eternally chasing

its own beginning, its own end.

I stack wood in order to find order

flanges of wood, splinters in my blood

ordinary things speaking in tongues

In dreams I ask for explanations

He hands me a book

says, Pretty good story, huh?

This, my gift for healing

I wanted to find the edges of the cup

I wanted to slide down the white belly

for those who will follow

not of my own lineage

for I have taken back life too many times

to live a charmed life

The decisions, hard as silica pierced my heart

opened it to the vulturing wind

and genetic code fluxing the lake of memory

ancestral chain of mountains  scouring the sky.

I give you the heart of these mountains for safekeeping

they require the singing of your feet at sky level

and they will give you fragments of me

buried in the crystalline structure of quartz and fossilized bone

I have found fragments of ancient trees wishing to speak

locked in the eternity of stone

I wanted the edge of the earth to find me for once

I believed in falling off it

I was given no object to hold

nothing to pass on except the work of my life

and the ability to find the hidden lineage in everything

the circle of the cup following me white in sleep

offering me coffee to keep awake.

I want to tell you to live is to be fully wakened

to the song of the sky

against the edges of the mountains

the gift my grandmother gave me

there are no edges, no endings

the round eye of the cup

singing patterns of the equator

of our lives

in these mountains of our past

the Styrofoam cup is a poor reminder

of this final century of the millennium

its progeny on all the sacred trails

of poetry without borders.

10/14/94
Fort Mason
Al Hunter's poetry workshop, 
CPITS International Conference

Lima Journal, a rough timeline (3 watercolors)

Not sure of the dates, I’m also missing one Ecuador journal but inside my watercolor block I found three watercolor sketches, one of Ecuador, two unfinished sketches of Puerto Ayora.

Timeline: 

7/3 Equator

When? Galapagos

7/12 Española Island

7/13 Floreana, PO Bay

7/17? Bartolomé 

7/19 

7/25 Ecuador to Lima

7/27 Cuzco

8/8 to 11 Machu Picchu

8/19 Arequipa, Puno

8/22 Paracas

8/29 SFO

We explore the countryside. We visit the Otavalo market to buy Panama hats. Otovaleños still speak Quechua, a hangover from the Inca conquest days but their original language is lost.

No date:

7/26. No dates in my journal…. At the airport we hold a copy of our chapbook of poetry Falling to Sea Level in hopes that the Peruvian poet Carlos Arellano has come to meet us. We’ve been told that Peru is positively dangerous for rip-offs. And we guard each other’s flank diligently.

The exchange rate about 80 intis to the dollar and so we convert money, it’s a much better rate on the black market but we need the intis now. I can’t begin to describe Peru without comparing it to Ecuador. I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico, in Baja California, Guatemala. Mexico City helps prepare for the shock but it’s far worse than that. Any port in a storm just won’t do here. There are limits. 

The city is so dismal. I thought Jesus was a being quaint when he locked us into the car as we left the airport but he was protecting us from the city. He couldn’t protect us from the view. People picking their way through piles of refuge refuge. Mongrels guarding claimed treasure. Cardboard and tin shanties and other building material. 

Where one enters a Third World country one can expect to see buildings in a continual state of growth and repair. When one level is finished, the cement, the bricks, and the mortar are used to add a second or third story onto an insubstantial first story structure. So the skyline is a series of ragged walls and tall spears of rebar. 

Chickens adapt to rooftop living, clothes hang out a long time to dry— difficult in a place where the fog comes in for six months of the year. Small fires along the street, people warming themselves. Numerous street vendors and stalls. On one street the vendors have claimed it in its entirety, so it’s difficult to navigate. It is a street of oranges and shoes and gum and motor oil. 

The only time it rains here is when El Niño, the warm, current comes, changing the weather pattern and the normally cold Humboldt current turns warm. When this happens thousands of fish starve and die. The Antarctic current is one reason why it’s so cold and foggy here. Both it and the Humboldt currents feed La Garúa, the ever present mist.

Our room is $12 a night, pricy after Ecuador, where a bed goes for a dollar a night. Even food is expensive. Meals cost $1 to 2  here. The cost of living is about twice as high as Ecuador, with far fewer services. Our Hotel Colón was $5 a night.

Flying through the Andes from Quito to Lima, Ecuador Journal

At Guayaquil, the tectonic force of the Nazca Plate and the Cocos Plate disrupts the land. Isolated dome stratovolcanoes of Ecuador, not how I envisioned the Andes. Such enormous differences in structure, like comparing the coastal range to the Rockies or to the Cascades. Yet the name of our California andesite is derived from the Andes.

The plane takes off between the two ridges barely clearing the volcanoes. I find myself praying for safe passage, heart in throat, such vast girths. I am in awe. Cotacachi, near Otovalo, and sublime symmetrical cone Cotapaxi, Mt. Fuji's twin sister. Cotopaxi means "Neck of the Moon" and is worshiped as the “rain sender,” home of the gods. La Avenida de los Volcanes is aptly named.

One of the world's highest volcanoes, Cayembe shrouded with clouds, is the second highest in Ecuador, at 19,347 feet. But the tallest, Chimborazo at 20,548 feet, is perpetually hidden in cloud cover. Chimborazo is a massive double volcano. It was once thought that Chimborazo was the highest mountain on Earth.

Chimborazo means Snow on the other side. In Quechua it's called Urcurazu,  Urcu is mountain of ice. Chimborazo is the Taita (Father) and Tungurahua is Mama, hence Taita Chimborazo and Mama Tungurahua. Pachatata and Pachamama. A reference we'll hear again and again.

At the Equator, snow level begins at 15,000 feet. It is winter here, cold on the equator. We wear our winter clothes, and still we're cold. My blue Ecuadorian sweater weighs several pounds, I am glad for its warmth.

San Francisco de Quito, at 9,350 feet, is nestled between two long Andean ridges, and the páramo, the high semi-alpine grasslands or moors between timberline and snowline—with myriad strange plants that grow nowhere else in the world. Situated north-south in these pockets, is the old city. Quito, with its colonial architecture,  considered to be the most beautiful city in the Andes.

South of Guayaquil, and Ecuador, the terrain changes dramatically from coastal jungle to coastal desert. One bids goodbye to the equatorial Andes and its massive stratovolcanoes.

The contrast between Lima, Peru, and Quito is as startling as the cold weather. Lima sprawls on for miles at sea level along the coastal desert. The Cordillera Niegra at 15,000 feet on north-south block fault,  El Callejón de Huaylas. We are still on the avenue of the gods, la Avenida de los Volcanes. The Cordillera Blanca, long north-south block-fault ridges spreading out.

Escarpments and cirques, vast glacial walls. Cirques in every color of glacial blue imaginable, like blue-eyed tropical water beneath all that white. The Andes begin to look like how I imagine them to be in my dreams.

Beneath the plane, high ridges, eroded desert mountains, infrequent torrents, El Niño leaves scars, memories of riverbeds, and flashfloods, like Baja, like Death Valley, like Los Angeles Basin.

Lima is surrounded by real shantytowns, the Rímac River, the Babbling River, is a pit of burning garbage and devastation. I don't want the plane to land. The city center of Lima is inland. Lima is landlocked, while Miraflores, the place of flowers, is a long beach that we will escape to, and find blood blooming in the gutters of the Chorillos Tunnel. We have descended into the belly of the beast. Into hell. God help us.

7/25/1988
revised, added 10/16

*Rímac from the Quechua, rimaq, meaning "speaking" nicknamed El Río Hablador ("the talking river"). —Wiki

Postcard from the Galapagos, 0° Lat., 8° long.

LA MITAD DEL MUNDO

LA MITAD DEL MUNDO

Today I straddled the equator,
I stood in the middle of the world,
where I balanced with a foot
planted in each hemisphere,
where north and south become one,
where there is no separation of seasons,
where my bilateral body was equidistant,
where days and nights are equal,
where the garúa, the jealous drizzle
hid the volcanoes from our sight,
where we were enveloped
in a perpetual fog of misery,
Neptune's kingdom below us,
the sun's fiery eye, watching us
on any given Sunday.

7/3/1988
added, revised 10/12/2016