FIRST DAY OF FALL EQUINOX (take 2)

FIRST DAY OF FALL EQUINOX (take 2)

A cow lows for her calf

or companionship

in the lost folds of tawny hills.

In the tawny coastal hills

a cow calls for an errant calf

or companionship in the lost folds.

A fox coughs, deer hesitate, flick an ear,

dry grass rattles the throat of the wind

a tinder song of the Fall Equinox

a lone crow patrols the deep sky.

EQUINOX, WALKER CREEK RANCH (take 3)

In the tawny coastal hills

a cow bawls for her errant calf

or for or companionship in the lost folds.

A fox coughs, deer hesitate, test the air.

Dry grass rattles the wind's throat,

a tinder song of the Fall Equinox.

A lone crow patrols and scolds the deep sky.

A poem escapes the bowl of the valley

takes flight and nestles in the crevices of the mind.

Invitation to a fleeting poem within the mind

pulls me between worlds, both corporeal and transparent.

I learn anew, vulnerability is our only real strength.

How, then, to make peace with this valley

where I was nearly killed a decade ago?

Susan tells me it's OK to not be ready

to return to that place of resurrection.

In dreams we are reminded of who we are

and we remain standing in the grace

of what we may become.

What god would have us be so?

What am I now?

Walker Creek, CA

Huckleberries

MY cousin Sineád and I went huckleberrying on the Autumn Equinox at our secret spot on Inverness Ridge near Tomales Bay, where we used to go berrying with our grandmother. Hard to believe so much time has passed since I hiked the highlands of the other Inverness, Scotland. I once thought that 20 years was a widening gulf—impossible to retrace extant memories of childhood. Here, at Tomales, it really is like Loch Ness; in the pine forest we’ve strange white deer from China instead of the red deer. Instead of Nessie sightings, the San Andreas Fault stretches its monstrous length northward and great white sharks relentlessly patrol the mouth of the bay. My grandmother said Nessie was a coelacanth—Gaelic ceili, for “singing” fish. As a child she remembered the fishermen catching the rare singing fish in the North Sea. From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, a mountainous corona against the shimmering sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean!

The weather at the Point is capricious. Once my aunts and uncles went out to the headlands to gather abalone. Caught in a whiteout of tule fog, they nearly drove off the cliffs. Only the urgent whispering surf on the rocks saved them. Offshore fog rising like a vast wall against a sky where tiny fishing boats disappear into its maws, makes me think of a Chinese silk scroll, or a painting I once saw in the Tate Gallery by Turner. The wind-ravaged bishop pines, draped in the pale traces of Spanish mosses we once used as green tresses, took a severe beating from last year’s storms. So many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the steep hillsides. This part, primordial as the beginnings of time, unscathed by the devastating Inverness Ridge inferno that blackened the hills for miles. But the resilient land is again clothed in the succulent grasses the deer favor at sunset.

Neruda wrote Death is an admiral on a ship. . . Many shipwrecks along this treacherous coast. We found hand-forged square nails, slow crawling moonsnails, and pottery shards in the lagoons and on the beaches of Limantour Spit. The natives of Point Reyes and Bodega Bay thought the sailing ships arose like white birds from the belly of the sea, and the white-skinned explorers—ghosts. They tried to sing away the apparitions of the otherworld. They had no words for this, other than the arrival of death.

Because this peninsula is now public land, Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything: huckleberries, or moss-covered antlers. Short, thick branch: a fallow deer’s. Non-native, like us. We lugged our 2-year-old nephew, Seán, through the undergrowth. He plucked each berry like a little king appraising jewels in sunlight, then greedily fisted them into his mouth until he was tattooed with violet juice. Returning the memory of those who came before us, we re-enacted an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red.

My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries, so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking), we make jokes, compare them to caviar, as we drop them from silver spoons, polishing them, black pearls on purpling terrycloth towels. But it gives us an excuse to be together, like in the old days. We’ll eat pie and have tea from the Blue Willow teapot with a cracked spout. Later, we’ll go to a party at the Straus farm across Tomales Bay on the barren, grassy Marshall hillsides and make gallons of huckleberry ice cream with their cream fresh from the dairy. Jungle-lush Inverness Ridge is part of what’s left of the granitic Pacific Plate, while Marshall with its thin red soil of Franciscan strata, is part of the North American Plate. Two continents divided by a thin bay, different as night and day.

© 1997 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

FEEDING THE MINOTAUR

       Un lungo errore in cieco laberinto.

             —Petrarch

                            To John Oliver Simon

This is just to say that enroute

to the emergency meeting I was crucially lost

in the philosophical distance over bilateral

distinctions between the left and the right

exits for MacArthur Blvd., on the Nimitz freeway

wondering why travel required the ghostly benediction

of five-star generals; the army vs the navy.

Mapless, having destroyed all evidence of you,

I toured the burnt stubble of the Oakland hills

(thinking I was south of the border),

searching for the lost gate to 680,

onramps to nuministic labyrinths spiraling me

through the umbilical treachery of tunnels and fault lines,

always away from the source—

and time unrolled like an angry fuse down Telegraph.

Yes, every cell in our bodies having changed,

I wondered what the lesson was this time,

until I walked in Tobey’s door to see you,

my azul minotaur; I found the arbitrary red lines

and blue highways on the funereal map of reprieve.

I’d dreamed of hunting with women

who made their home on these street corners

beneath the sign of the horned Artemis.

Blame it on the undercurrent ballistics of the Piscine moon.

I’ve held both ends of the thread long enough, ready

to flee the purgatorial darkness; your hooves

having scrawled treaties of abandonment in the dust—

enough to bury us—except for that

small, final harvest taken

before the fall.

Tender enemy, once we had no need of threads

or mapping codes. Once I fed you late apples,

we practiced flight beneath the carnelian moon

and the gates of the garden moved open.

Thousands of angelitos singing in the trees.

The Southern Cross offering us up

before the rising sun.

9/20-22/94 Fall Equinox
1995 Maverick, Terrapin issue

sometimes my notes are little poems all by themselves.

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

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